W. E. FORD: A BIOGRAPHY 

J. D. BERESFORD and 
KENNETH R I C H M O N n 



By J.. D. BERESFORD 

House-Mates 

The Wonder 

These Lynnekers 

The Early History of Jacob Stahl 

A Candidate for Truth 

The Invisible Event 

The House in Demetrius Road 

by j. d. beresford and 
kenneth richmond 

W. E. Ford: A Biography 

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
NEW YORK 




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W. E. FORD: 

A BIOGRAPHY 



J. d: beresford 

AND 

KENNETH RICHMOND 




NEW YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 






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COPYRIGHT, 1917, 
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



A479316 



PREFATORY NOTE 

A DEAwiNG in Mrs. Ford^s possession, represent- 
ing Ford at about the age of fifteen, has been 
deliberately chosen in preference to later photo- 
graphs for the frontispiece of this book. This pic- 
ture of the boy will have a novel interest for most 
of those who knew and admired the man ; but there 
is another reason for the choice. The drawing has 
in it the spirit of Ford's personality and charac- 
ter; the photographs have not. 

The authors have to thank Mrs. Ford for her 
kindness in revising the work before publication, 
and in affording material help as regards the col- 
lation of facts ; at the same time they wish to take 
all responsibility in matters of conjecture and in- 
terpretation, inseparable from any but a coldly 
formal biography, but not fitly to be presented as 
though based upon Mrs. Ford's authority. 

It has not fallen within the scope of this book 
to present Ford's system of thought as a coherent 
whole, but it is hoped that this may be attempted 
in a later volume; the co-operation is cordially 
invited of those who at any time belonged to his 
circle, and any letters bearing definitely upon his 
position as a thinker will be welcomed. These 
may be sent care of the publishers. Any letters 
in Ford's own writing will be copied and carefully 
returned. 



CONTENTS 



PART I: A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 

BY J. D. BERESFORD 
CHAPTER PAGE 

1 11 

II 22 

III 36 

PART II: A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 

BY KENNETH RICHMOND 

IV 55 

V 77 

VI 103 

VII 129 

VIII 161 

IX 202 

X 231 

PART III: A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S 
PHILOSOPHY 

BY J. D. BERESFORD 

XI 265 



PART ONE 
A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 



PART ONE 

A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 

CHAPTER I 

If we wanted an excuse for publishing this life of 
W. E. Ford, I should look for it in the fact that 
biography is in the main didactic, a fact that helps 
to explain the usual choice of a subject who has 
succeeded in life. Success in this connection, how- 
ever, has a somewhat limited meaning, and im- 
plies the making of a mark in public life or the 
accomphshment of some achievement in the plib- 
lic service — the invention of the Davy lamp, for 
example. The more obvious reason for this choice 
of subject is that the book receives a preliminary 
advertisement. There is a demand for the lives 
of notable men, simply because they were notable. 
But I submit that the moral purpose of biography 
underlies the demand also. As in the old Sunday- 
school books, the clear indication remains promi- 
nent: ^^See what comes of being good!" or to 
adapt the lesson to present conditions: '^See 
what comes of being clever ! ' ' Nevertheless, when 
only the cleverness that leads to commercial sue- 



1« W. E. FORD 

cess is the biographer's field of study, he is still 
under the influence of the old tradition, and takes 
care to omit the suggestion that his subject was 
an unprincipled swindler. If the truth is alto- 
gether too obvious, he dwells on the gentleness of 
his relations in private life. It has become almost 
a convention that the financier who controls the 
money-market and wreaks death and destitution 
without a moment's consideration, is in private 
life a devoted husband and father. I cannot re- 
call a single instance of a biography that depicted 
the reverse attitude; but the life of a man who 
brought happiness to the many and was a per- 
fect beast in his own home, would make very in- 
teresting reading. 

An exception to the ^^ success" rule, and one 
that upholds my present contention, is to be found 
in the demand for the lives of men who were in 
no way celebrated but were unquestionably 
^'good.'' The lives of missionaries and obscure 
ministers mostly find a sale that justifies publica- 
tion. Some deep instinct in mankind looks for 
and finds satisfaction in salvation by morality; 
and the contemplation of that salvation achieved 
by another, either affords us a temporary relief 
from the terrible strain of being good ourselves, 
or soothes us with the certainty that we, too, shall 
eventually profit by our renunciations. (It is 
worth while to note, incidentally, that the form of 
''goodness" held up for example in works of this 
type is nearly always negative ; that is to say, by 
renunciation. John Knox and his like had more 



A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 13 

influence on the English Prayer-book and the Eng- 
lish character, than all the mystics.) 

The third general category of biography — the 
life of the creative artist — achieves the ethical 
only by omission. And when a man is confronted 
with the task of depicting the life of, say, Fran- 
gois Villon or Paul Verlaine, the ethical motive 
has to be ignored, save by the implication that 
Verlaine, for example, might have been a still 
better poet if he had been a better man. Never- 
theless, the trace of the tradition remains in any 
biography that is not, quite frankly, a chronique 
scandaleuse. We know perfectly well, now, that 
William Godwin was a dreadful rascal, but we do 
not know it from reading Mr. Kegan Paul's life 
of him. Yes, even in the biographies of the cre- 
ative artists, the great attempt is always implicit 
— often, of course, by the antithetical method of 
'^Oh! what a pity.'' We may content ourselves 
with the reflection that the idle apprentice gets to 
the devil all right, though he may have written 
great poetry or great music on the way. 

All this prelude is by way of justification for 
an experiment in writing the life of a man who 
was completely unknown to the general public, 
and who died in Japan, not in the effort to illum- 
inate the heathen, but rather to find illumination 
for himself. The name of William Elphinstone 
Ford will evoke no response in the minds of news- 
paper readers. He published no book, he was not 
an explorer, nor an inventor, nor a politician, he 
was connected with no religious society, and his 



14 W. E. FORD 

one real experiment in education was, from the 
outside point of view, a failure. And yet Mr. 
Richmond and I are agreed that Ford had a rare 
genius, and that even the little we may be able 
to record of his life and principles has a peculiar 
value at the present time, and will have a still 
greater value a few years hence. We have, in 
fact, the prevailing excuse that this sketch of 
Ford's life is in the best and widest sense of the 
word — didactic. We sincerely believe that his 
theories of education and conduct are worthy of 
the closest attention. 

Nevertheless, to be quite honest, the inducement* 
that led me to accept a share in this book when 
my friend Kenneth Richmond suggested the ex- 
periment, was not atforded by the considerations 
I have just advanced. Those came later, when 
my collaborator and I had seriously to consider 
the possibility of our book being published. In 
the first place, I was tempted by a recognition of 
the fact that Ford's theories seemed already to 
be spreading abroad. In art, in fiction, in philos- 
ophy, in sociology, and even in such sciences as 
psychology, I was being constantly confronted 
with a half- grasped assumption that I recognised 
as having some sort of relation with the specula- 
tions of Ford. 

To a certain extent this has no doubt arisen 
from my own attitude of expectation. I have 
found the thing I looked for, and perhaps exag- 
gerated the significance of the indications. But 
I am convinced that when every allowance has 



A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 15 

been made for my personal prejudice, sufficient 
evidence remains to prove that civilisation is mov- 
ing towards the development of a new expression 
in religion. 

Briefly and very indefinitely stated, this change 
is from a negative to a positive attitude towards 
God; from a morality that depends upon repres- 
sion to one that depends upon the liberation of 
impulse. 

I can weU imagine that the captious will at once 
expostulate that this principle is as old as his- 
tory; that it has been attempted in practice and 
has led to nothing but licence, debauchery and 
collapse. Further, that it is the ^'excuse'' of 
every artist — an amoral creature by hypothesis 
— and was the foundation of Nietzsche's cruel and 
subversive philosophy. 

My single reply to these objections practically 
covers the whole ground. It rests upon the as- 
sertion that by the liberation of impulse or free 
expression, Ford intended not the impulses and 
expressions of animal desires, but those of what 
he calls the ^^ primitive urge behind life.'' And 
this differentiation becomes important when we 
realise that he regarded that urge as invariably 
tending towards development, even if such devel- 
opment might not, under present conditions, be 
generally recognised as '^goodness" in the sense 
of conventional morality. In effect he had a 
higher opinion of the universal content than had 
Nietzsche. Ford, himself, was the exponent of a 
naturally moral tendency, and he had faith in 



16 W. E. FORD 

the virtue of his own impulses as the delivery of 
an essentially beneficial urge. He might perhaps 
have defined his aim as the will to expression ; he 
would certainly not have defined it as the will to 
power. 

But if he had gone still further and accepted 
the definition of goodness commonly assumed by 
the churches, his principle would still have dif- 
fered radically from theirs. For the practice of 
all present day religions is founded on the com- 
mandments beginning "thou shalt not/' treating 
God as lawgiver and judge, a creature swift to 
anger and to condemnation. And Ford intuitively 
rejected a process of virtue that advanced by 
elimination; as though "goodness" were a liquor 
that must be endlessly strained and refined. He 
preferred in all his analogies some figure that 
presented the thought of encouragement and 
growth ; and I think that by developing ' ' free ex- 
pression," he may have meant that we should 
concentrate our energies on the delivery of the 
finer impulses rather than on the suppression of 
the baser. I say he may have intended this, but 
I have been greatly handicapped by the fact that 
I have no written material of his, not so much 
as a single note. For all my exposition, I have 
had to depend on my memory of a few discussions 
between us (one of them lasted for five hours), 
and I find it exceedingly difficult, now, to sepa- 
rate my own contribution to his theory of life. 
Ford was so apparently ductible in argument. 
He had a wonderful gift for making one state 



A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 17 

his own point of view. If he had been more 
dogmatic, my present task would have been an 
easier one. . . . 

But I am afraid that I am laying too much 
stress on philosophy in this introduction, foras- 
much as the greater part of the book — all Mr. 
Richmond's contribution, in fact — will hardly 
touch on that development of Ford's thought. 
Without question Ford's first claim to attention 
is as a pioneer in education, and I do not wish 
for a moment to put that claim in the background. 
At the same time I feel that I am not a reliable 
exponent of the educational theory and method 
which are elucidated in some detail by Mr. Rich- 
mond in chapters iv.-x. My hesitation in this is 
due to a realisation that while I have had no 
experience that qualifies me to give an opinion, 
I am an ardent enthusiast for the principles Ford 
endeavoured to put into practice. And as your 
professional educationist has little tolerance for 
lay enthusiasm, I am particularly anxious not to 
prejudice him from the outset by a discussion of 
technicalities which might betray my ignorance. 
Nevertheless, education enters the province that 
I have made my own in this experimental biogra- 
phy; and in that connection I feel entitled to ex- 
press a general opinion that involves no discus- 
sion of detail. 

For I see that any hope for a practical exposi- 
tion of Ford's philosophy will be found in the 
schoolroom. Few adults are teachable, but most 
children. And I believe that many enlightened 



18 W. E. FORD 

educationists are beginning to grasp the truth 
that the road to knowledge is not by the way ot 
memorising facts, but by the understandmg and 
relation of facts. The obvious difficulty which 
as Mr. Richmond shows, confronts the pioneer ot 
this theory, is the argument that a truly synthetic 
education does not fit a child to enter the com- 
mercial and competitive conditions of modem 
life There may be practical means of overcom- 
ing'this difficulty. I leave that to the expert. But 
my own hope is founded on the behef that the 
children of the new race will alter the conditions. 
If we have faith in Ford's theories of education, 
philosophy and morals, we must be courageous 
enough to risk the immediate financial success 
of the younger generations. 

Before I leave this introduction, I want to 
make two further comments; and the first is with 
reference to the great European War. Ford died 
before August, 1914, and I have, therefore, no 
direct opinion of his with regard to it; but i 
think his probable attitude can be quite deh- 
nitely inferred. . 

Personally, I regard this war as evidencing the 
final failure of the Christian principle of sup- 
pression. How far that principle derives from 
Christ and not from the embroideries of the theo- 
logian, I have no time to discuss. The one ab- 
surd iustification for fighting which has been ad- 
vanced by the churches, rests on the text, I came 
to bring not peace but a sword,'' a statement con- 
flicting so intolerably with Christ's general doc- 



A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 19 

trine, that we can only suppose it to have been 
either an interpolation by a later hand, or, as 
seems more probable, a prophecy and not an af- 
firmation of purpose. In any case the quotation 
of this one text is obviously futile as a defence. 
It cannot be separated from the body of Christ's 
teaching. And I maintain that the man who at- 
tempts to justify his attitude as a militant with 
his attitude towards Christianity, is incapable of 
intellectual or spiritual honesty. If he believes 
that England was bound in honour to intervene in 
the first place, to carry on the struggle by every 
means in her power, and finally to continue it un- 
til she is able to dictate the terms of peace, then 
let that man be honest enough to admit that the 
ethic of Christianity is not applicable to present 
conditions. That conclusion, as I have said, is m}" 
own, but I know that Ford would have agreed 
with me. 

I believe that this war was necessary, and I 
believe that it will be beneficial to mankind as a 
whole. It has arisen, all modern wars have arisen, 
from individual and national inhibitions. Sup- 
pression and concealment are the common tools 
of all diplomacy. Race hatreds and jealousies 
arise only from misunderstandings and cowardice. 
Everywhere the influence of the old principle of 
thrusting down evil rather than encouraging 
good, has led to morbid desires and national hys- 
teria. And beyond a certain point, the national 
body must rid itself of these morbid secretions or 
go mad. Germany had reached her limit of en- 



20 W. E. FORD 

durance, and her hysteria has found an expression 
in her hatred of England — the forced, unnatural 
expression of the thwarted. Nevertheless, there 
is a hope that this war will act as a purge that 
will enable Europe for a time to see more clearly. 
Already there is a faintly discernible movement 
towards a greater honesty; towards liberation. 
But only by the education of children on new 
lines will this slight gain be made good. If we 
are in future to teach the fundamental ethic of 
Christianity, it must be restated. It is useless for 
us to love our enemies, if we must first learn to 
hate ourselves. If the Pharisee's self-righteous- 
ness was false, so also was the self-abasement of 
the publican. . . . 

My second comment is an anticipation of the 
conventional test that will surely be applied to 
Ford. If he was such a great man, the critic will 
say, how is it that he had no influence on his con- 
temporaries! My reply is, firstly, that he had 
considerable influence on his immediate circle — 
as this little endeavour to interpret him ought to 
denionstrate. And, secondly, that this influence 
was restricted simply because he had no craze for 
publicity. For while he was singularly free from 
any affectation of modesty, he had none of the 
convinced self -righteousness of the propagandist. 
He lived his own philosophy by simply being him- 
self — an uncommonly hard, perhaps an impos- 
sible, task for any public man in modern condi- 
tions. Possibly W. E. Gladstone came as near the 
ideal as any prominent statesman of recent years. 



A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 21 

In conclusion, I relinquish, with a sigh of dis- 
satisfaction, this task of trying to present Ford. 
I feel that I have failed to render him with any- 
thing approaching justice; and I console myself 
with the reflection that Mr. Richmond's chapters 
on education are a real contribution to knowl- 
edge. We have candidly admitted, Richmond 
and I, that this book is an experiment, and that 
we are none too pleased with the form it has 
taken. But while Ford's philosophy may need 
endless elaboration, his educational theory and 
practice are, we feel assured, the methods of the 
future — let us hope of the immediate future. 



CHAPTER II 

I FiKST met Ford on the evening of the 22nd of 
June, 1897. He, like myself, had taken advantage 
of the Diamond Jubilee celebrations to escape 
from London ; but his purpose and mine had little 
in common. 

I was working in an architect's office in Moor- 
gate Street at that time; and as pageants and 
processions have never interested me (I lived for 
eighteen consecutive years in London without see- 
ing a Lord Mayor's Show), I had profited by the 
holiday to go up the river for three days with a 
friend from the office, and his brother, a sailor in 
the merchant service. After a damp, depressing 
Sunday that was impossible for boating, we had 
a very good holiday. By a fluke we saw the Queen 
leave Windsor on Monday morning — we had gone 
up into the town to buy provisions — and on the 
day of the procession we had a long jolly day sail- 
ing down from Bray to Halliford, which had been 
our point of departure. My two companions were 
returning to town that night, but they advised me 
to stay down at Shepperton. My friend from 
the office was always very thoughtful for me, and 
he was afraid that there might be great crowds 
in the street to see the illuminations, and that I, 
with my game leg, might find some difficulty in 

22 



A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 23 

getting' back to my lodgings near King's Cross. 

So I stayed the night at the Railway Hotel at 
Shepperton — a queer little inn kept by a Swiss 
named Aubert. And it was there that I met 
Ford. 

He was the only other visitor, and according 
to the etiquette of the Auberts (I stayed there 
many times afterwards) he had a right to the 
use of the dark little sitting-room by virtue of 
the fact of his prior arrival. I was introduced 
by permission, chiefly on the ground, I fancy, that 
this was a special occasion. The common meet- 
ing place of the inn's visitors was a little parlour 
behind the bar. 

It must have been nearly nine o'clock when I 
was introduced to Ford by Mrs. Aubert, who was 
English and phlegmatic, although she always 
wore an air of being slightly offended, even by 
the most reasonable, not to say profitable, re- 
quest. I was probably presented as ^^ another 
gentleman"; and her ^4f you wouldn't mind 'is 
'aving supper in 'ere," was spoken, no doubt, 
with her usual effect of faint resentment. To 
me, she had spoken of the occupant of the sit- 
ting-room as if he had been the great Panjan- 
drum himself. I had felt that my intrusion was 
quite unwarranted, until I in turn figured as 
^'another gentleman" with suggested rights and 
dignities. 

The lamp was lighted — it was dark in that room 
at midday; either the Swiss or the English influ- 
ence insisted on two pairs of curtains and a lace 



24 W. E. FORD 

muslin blind for the insufficient window — and as 
Ford got up when I was presented, his face was 
in the shadow of the painted cardboard lamp- 
shade when he answered. I thought him a little 
morose. He mumbled something that I did not 
catch. 

I was twenty-four then, and had much the 
same illusions with regard to chance meetings 
that H. G. Wells has described as those of Mr. 
Polly. I looked forward to them romantically, 
but unlike Mr. Polly I saw my own part as fur- 
nishing the effective element of surprise. I based 
my dreaming on that episode described by Bor- 
row in The Bible in Spain; and in my adaptation 
of the incident, I imaginatively tramped England 
in corduroys and hobnails, and astounded some 
travelling scholar by an erudition greater than 
his own. I must add, however, that my erudition 
was non-existent — I invented that. 

And my first impressions of Ford, and our ear- 
lier conversation that night, were slightly preju- 
diced by this attitude of mine. I was only an ar- 
chitect's assistant on a salary of £2, 10s. a week, 
and I wanted to pretend that I was something 
more than that. 

After Mrs. Aubert had gone to get my inevi- 
table bacon and eggs, I started a man-of-the-world 
conversation with a criticism of her manner. Ford 
was not responsive. I was an egregious young 
ass; and he was shy with casual strangers, and 
must from the outset have been prepared for 
boredom. The effect of his polite replies, how- 



A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 25 

ever, produced a result he had not designed. 

I have always been very sensitive to criticism. 
Any one can shut me up in conversation. Un- 
derneath that romantic desire to shine in any 
society, I carry the knowledge of my own inca- 
pacity; a knowledge that I have ever candidly 
faced and admitted in the secret colloquies of 
myself and my own mind. And Ford, who was 
also a sensitive creature of another type, dis- 
cerned my hurt when I suddenly lapsed into a 
shamed silence ; and he sought to repair his fault 
by beginning to talk. 

I did not see at the time how that opening 
of an acquaintance displayed an essential dif- 
ference between him and me. We were both shy 
and sensitive, but my eyes were turned inwards, 
his outwards. When he did not respond, I began 
to criticise my own feebleness; and if our posi- 
tions had been reversed, I should never have dis- 
cerned, as he did, the reason for the silence that 
threatened to fall upon us. Again, where I should 
have reflected the inferred attitude of my com- 
pany, he retained his individuality, and sought 
to examine the character of those with whom he 
was confronted. His sympathies never influenced 
him, as my sympathies influence me, to act a part. 

He began to talk about the river, and I re- 
sponded to that. I know the river well, and my 
replies at first were, I suspect, largely topograph- 
ical — another boast of knowledge. But presently 
he touched me to hesitating confidences. There 
were thinocs I had felt about the Thames that I 



26 W. E. FORD 

could never confess to any of my friends in the 
office ; things that I had no language to explain to 
them or, indeed, to any one. And Ford's genius, 
in some wonderful way, perceived the beginnings 
of those perceptions in me. He touched, by way 
of opening, on the history of the river, of the old 
encampment at Sinodun Hill, for instance; and 
then dared to expose the sensitive skin of my 
romantic temperament by asking me if I had 
ever seen the mysteries that descend upon the 
^^ depths of water stilled at even.'' 

My reply was inadequate. I knew, but I had 
no words to tell my knowledge. I was confused 
because I realised my inability to describe my 
emotions. And I was horribly handicapped by 
my desire to prove that I was capable of appre- 
ciating his suggestions. The line from The 
Blessed Damozel was unknown to me, although 
from his delivery I recognised it as a quotation. 

Nevertheless, I began to expand. I described 
an adventure I and two other men had had at 
Sutton Courtney, when after a long day of rain 
and wind, we had crept up the backwater at sun- 
set to find a camping ground, and had come won- 
derfully upon an old mill, and floated into an en- 
ceinte of high resonant walls that filled us with 
a fear of our own whispering voices. 

I put the story into clumsy, colloquial phrases 
that conveyed nothing of the place nor of my own 
feelings; but Ford understood. 

And from that we came to a discussion of liter- 
ature, spoiled at first by the remains of my ro- 



A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 27 

mantic desire to appear well-read. I tried to 
make the best of the little reading I had, but it 
was hopelessly inadequate, and when I found my- 
self referring all his openings to my limited au- 
thorities, I honestly shifted my ground and con- 
fessed my lack of education. Ford had put me 
almost at my ease by then. 

The confession was not a new one, but it had 
often taken the form of a boast. Chronologi- 
cally it ran: Four years at a dame's school; a 
year and a half at Oundle under Mungo Park; 
four months at home with occasional lessons from 
a neighbouring parson who was trying to educate 
his own son ; one term at a private school in Nor- 
folk; and finally, four terms at the King's School, 
Peterborough, before, at sixteen, I began the first 
approach to architecture by studying building 
construction at the Peterborough Art School. As 
a matter of fact I was not yet seventeen when my 
first set of articles was signed with the Diocesan 
Surveyor, whose offices at Stamford — eight miles 
from my home — I visited three times a week for 
nearly two years. It was a fair subject for boast, 
that haphazard education, calculated to develop 
nothing so much as the habit of slacking. I al- 
ways left my listener to draw his own inference ; 
but my usual attitude of ^^Here I am" was, on this 
occasion, perhaps, a trifle plaintive. I may have 
been uncertain whether my point of arrival was 
not the too obvious result of my lack of training. 

Ford overlooked the effect. He was interested 
in the cause and began to question me. And if 



28 W. E. FORD 

I was somewhat eager for the final verdict, for 
some assurance that I had emerged creditably 
from this welter of various disciplines, I was flat- 
tered by his interest, and proud to answer his 
questions with a readiness that displayed my 
own criticism of the scholastic methods I had 
suffered. The verdict never came. In place of 
that, he opened my eyes to possibilities I had 
never then considered. 

His suggestions came to me then in the guise of 
a revelation ; not because he threw them off with 
any air of being sent to lighten my darkness, but 
because my mind was ready to take his point of 
view. I was suddenly hungry for this new food, 
although I had not before been aware of any ap- 
petite. 

It is difficult now to separate the particular 
suggestions he made that night from the com- 
pleter argument I heard him set out in later con- 
versations ; but certain of his simpler theses must 
have been touched upon at our first meeting. In- 
deed, it seems to me that I can recall precisely the 
tones of his clear, gentle voice, a little muffled 
by the apparatus of hangings in that dark sitting- 
room — even the fireplace was elaborately hung 
and curtained. We had finished supper and he 
was sitting on the sofa, his face a little in the 
shadow. And, to me, the voice was the mouth- 
piece of an oracle that amazingly delivered the 
stifled knowledge of my subconscious thought. 

No doubt the rendering is characteristically my 
own, and Richmond, who was Ford 's disciple in a 



A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 29 

sense that I never conld be, will perhaps object 
that my translation has lost the spirit of the orig- 
inal. Nevertheless, I do not think that my per- 
versions and remodellings will seriously misrep- 
resent Ford's general attitude. If they do, I com- 
mend a study of Richmond's chapters as more 
likely to display the inwardness of these theories 
than my own personal reactions to what ap- 
peared, most hopefully at the time, as a new doc- 
trine; even the radical openings of Froebel and 
Herbart were quite unknown to me at the age of 
twenty-four. 

For Ford began, at first tentatively, and after- 
wards with an increased precision, to put before 
me the possibility that my scattered education 
had saved me from many of the intellectual vices 
which might have arisen from the discipline of a 
single dogmatic method. He suggested that all 
my various new starts and uncompleted exercises 
had been preparing me to accept knowledge, while 
they had mercifully left me without prejudice in 
favour of a specialised course. He made me real- 
ise that the structure of knowledge is ever the 
same, that Euclid is a preparation for the study 
of botany, or Greek inflections for the writing of 
English prose. He used a physical analogy to il- 
lustrate that thesis under my hesitating recogni- 
tion, and gave me a picture of a finely trained 
muscular system, quick and adaptable ; a tool com- 
petent for any specialisation, if specialisation 
were ultimately the goal of a particular education. 

I grasped that figure with the objection that 



30 W. E. FORD 

my mind had not been trained in all its parts, 
that there were functions which had been wholly 
neglected, and he met me with the quiet reply 
that he was not maintaining a case for the hap- 
hazard, but merely for a principle more nearly 
approached in my case than it would have been 
if I had stayed seven years at a typical public 
school of the period. 

''You had some kind of chance," he said— a 
sentence that stuck in my memory. It came to me 
as a revelation, just then, that there were other 
forms of ^ cleverness besides the ability to discuss 
the classics. I had always admired sound schol- 
arship; I do still; but Ford confirmed the hope 
that scholarship was not the beginning and end 
of wisdom. Before I met him that hope had been 
a vague thing which sometimes took the appro- 
priate form of an anchor, but at other times wore 
the semblance of a snare, the pitiful excuse of 
one who knew all too surely that scholarship 
could never be within his reach. 

My ''chance," as I inferred from Ford's fur- 
ther conversation, lay in my undestroyed capacity 
for synthesis. I — he took me merely as an in- 
stance — could still approach knowledge without 
bias. What I had learned in spite of my training 
had provided me with a basis. My little Latin 
and less Greek were enough to furnish me with a 
better touchstone than that I should have had if 
I had concentrated on them to the neglect of all 
thosfe other branches of knowledge. 

I remember that he turned aside to dismiss that 



A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 31 

metaphor. ' ^ You have avoided one danger, ' ' was 
the gist of his speech, '^the danger of regarding 
one particular subject as the root and trunk of 
all learning. But one can't think of knowledge as 
a tree,'' he went on; ''it would be a very queer 
kind of tree, wouldn't it, with a different sort of 
fruit on every branch! And all of them spring- 
ing, according to the classicists, from the single 
root and trunk of the dead languages." 

I forget, now, the detail of his enlargement, 
and even whether he found another metaphor to 
take the place of the one he had discarded. What 
I recall seems, in the light of subsequent illumi- 
nations, to have been very elementary stuff in- 
deed, nothing more than a disposal, before my re- 
ceptive but untrained eyes, of principles that even 
the modern academic admits with a petulant re- 
luctance. Nevertheless, they were principles that 
at once roused my ignorant enthusiasm, and I re- 
ceived them as new-found truths that would pres- 
ently revolutionise the whole system of educa- 
tion. It was a revelation to me that school sub- 
jects should not be studied in sealed compart- 
ments; that ''history" and "geography" might 
go hand in hand, and that they were the basis 
of economics, or that the story of Caesar's cam- 
paigns might be made a vital link of connection 
between Mediterranean history and the history of 
continental Europe. (It is, indeed, a shameful 
fact that I could not then have indicated France, 
Belgium, Switzerland or Germany in any organic 
relation to the Gallic wars. I wonder if your ave- 



32 W. E. FORD 

rage Eton boy is much better informed at the 
present day?) 

All the substance of that night's conversation 
has gone back, now, into the dull store of accepted 
things. It may be that I have not Ford 's gift for 
keeping bright the structure of belief. He ap- 
proached me on our first meeting with the keen- 
ness of the recent discoverer; yet even then, his 
material must have been far from new to him. I, 
in his place, should have been wearied with the 
necessity for stating axioms, annoyed by the fool- 
ish unreadiness of my listener. But that was a 
gift of his. His problem never lost freshness ; he 
found new interest in the reflections of each new 
listener. For him each pupil was a fresh disclo- 
sure of the eternal miracle. 

We were coming within sight of that aspect of 
him when Mrs. Aubert finally drove us up to bed. 
He had been talking of the preparation of a mind 
to accept instruction, and then he looked at me 
with a faintly whimsical smile as if for the first 
time he touched upon some subject just precious 
enough to make him a little self-conscious. ''You 
only have to help a boy to dig the stufP up," he 
said, "help him to remember, you know." And 
his inflection t>i the word remember told me that 
he used it in a sense I was able to recognise. I 
had read Plato's Dialogues in an English trans- 
lation, and the "Meno" had left a distinct im- 
pression on my mind. My use of that little piece 
of erudition, however, chilled our closing rela- 
tions. Perhaps I had a sense of recovered stand- 



A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 33 

ing, or I may have realised that I had offered no 
positive contribution to the conversation for a 
long time. But I need not dwell on my interrup- 
tion, and I have long since abandoned my argu- 
ment against Socrates' theory of latent knowl- 
edge. Ford did not take up my weak little chal- 
lenge of materialism. No one knew better than 
he did, how great a waste of time it is to argue 
with an obstinate or momentarily elated oppo- 
nent. No ^'remembering'' comes that way. 

We should certainly have recovered our un- 
derstanding, if it had not been for Mrs. Aubert, 
but after a casual interruption at half-past ten to 
remind us that this was their closing time, she 
came in again a few minutes before eleven and 
asked us frankly if we were not going to bed. I 
was inclined to resent her interference, but Ford 
quietly submitted. 

I carried to bed with me a disturbing doubt as 
to whether he had not been relieved by our land- 
lady's interruption. My eternal self -depreciation 
suggested that despite his appearance of interest 
he had, in fact, been bored by my company. I 
saw myself, painfully, as the young ass who had 
begun by attempting a ridiculous boast of knowl- 
edge. 

That doubt, however, did not dominate me. If 
I remembered my attempted effect of scholarship 
with uneasiness, I was still warm with an appre- 
ciation of Ford's contribution to the conversation, 
and glad to remember that I had achieved an ul- 
timate honesty. And I gave Ford place, that 



34 W. E. FORD 

night, on my list of heroes ; that list of mine which 
never records more than one name at a time. 
There have been so many whom I have known 
and revered for months or, in some cases, for 
years. They begin, as Ford began, by appearing 
so astonishingly greater than myself. And they 
maintain their place, until I come to criticism, 
until by some slow reaction of thought or attitude 
I find the comparison between their abilities and 
my own does not invariably yield so great a bal- 
ance in their favour. But I dare not examine that 
complex characteristic of mine, it demands a 
greater consideration than I can give it in this 
place. I mention it only because it is a necessary 
test of my earlier relations with Ford. 

In this case the beginnings of hero-worship are 
reasonably obvious, if we assume in the postulant 
the temperament that inclines him to accept new 
doctrines. And although, as a matter of mere 
chronology, Ford was my senior by no more than 
three years, he was curiously older than I was. 
He certainly looked more than twenty-seven when 
I first met him. He was wearing a beard at that 
time, and that gave him, in my eyes, the dignity 
and prestige of a full-grown man — a prestige of 
which I have never become aware in myself. (At 
forty-four I am invariably surprised when some 
youngster of twenty-five or so evidences any sign 
of respect for my years.) But mere appearance 
counts for very little, and I recognised very soon' 
the many points of Ford^s superiority to myself. 
He had travelled, he had read, he knew something. 



A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 35 

about life. Up to the time of his death, I was 
never quite his contemporary. 

And so, since I had a vacancy just then, I in- 
stated Ford as hero ; and if I am to be honest in 
giving my impressions of him, I must admit that 
in those earlier years he seemed to me to tower. 



CHAPTEE III 

I SEEM to have put a halo round that first meet- 
ing with Ford; and now that I come to reflect on 
the later relations between us, I am a little handi- 
capped by a very natural desire to retain that 
glory, at least in the form of a permanent nimbus 
for my hero. I perfectly understand at this mo- 
ment why the biographer should so often appear 
as a lopsided optimist. The desire I mentioned 
urges me to glorify my subject because it affords 
me the opportunity of making something; and 
that particular form of creation is easier by far 
than understanding. If I were writing this book 
alone, — a task for which I have no qualifications 
— ^I should certainly romanticise Ford, and end 
by presenting a consistent, and possibly an ad- 
mirable portrait of an imaginary creature who 
bore a generic resemblance to the original, but 
would hardly be recognised by his friends. As it 
is, I am only contributing a few chapters to Mr. 
Richmond's work, and he will, I know, be ruth- 
less in his criticism. I submit that my task is a 
hard one for the mere novelist ; and claim a special 
measure of toleration on that account. Lastly — 
to end an apology that has been wrung from me 
by an hour of unprofitable contemplation, spent 
in staring with growing despondency at a sheet of 

36 



A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 37 

paper bearing the repulsive heading ^^ Chapter 
III.'' and nothing more — I must insist on one, as 
it seems to me, almost insuperable difficulty. In 
a novel the characters are invariably simplified. 
The most complex character in fiction is more 
reasonable and consistent than the average mem- 
ber of one's daily acquaintance. And in planning 
and working out a novel, one can satisfactorily 
invent reasons and explanations. In a biography 
one is permitted to suppress but not to invent. 

The stumbling-block that led to my hour 's waste 
of time and this subsequent apology, is my com- 
plete inability to account, in any way convincingly, 
for the fact that after our Jubilee night at Halli- 
ford, I did not meet Ford again for three years ; 
and met him then by the merest accident. I knew 
that it must seem, to put it mildly, highly improb- 
able that I should not have written to him. I had, 
indeed, promised to write and fix an appointment 
with him in the City, and I wore the envelope on 
which his address was scribbled, until the pen- 
cilled writing was an almost undecipherable blur. 
There is only one explanation possible — I was like 
that in those days. I had conceived an enthusiasm 
for Ford; and every time that, in my enforced 
evacuations of rubbish, I came across that par- 
ticular envelope (I used to stuff letters in my 
pockets until the lining went), I wrote to him 
long, rather literary letters — in my mind. None 
of them was ever put on paper. That was one of 
my particular weaknesses. I have criminally 
shirked the payment of a debt I honestly longed 



38 W. E. FORD 

to settle, because I could not summon resolution 
to do the thing at the moment. And, in the same 
way, I have deliberately walked past the door of 
a shop to which I had come in order to buy some- 
thing I, perhaps, urgently required. At the last 
moment, it seemed to me that to-morrow would 
do better for my purchase. After these instances 
it will, I hope, be just comprehensible that I put 
otf my letter to Ford indefinitely. 

But, Destiny — for no particular purpose that I 
can trace — ^planned with a delicate accuracy that 
I should meet Ford in London Wall during my 
lunch time, some three years or so after our first 
meeting — an accident that so far affected my life 
to a just appreciable extent. The year of that 
second meeting was, I know, 1900, because we 
discussed the Boer War a few days later ; and the 
peculiar phase of that struggle, my certainty that 
it was summer, and that, for reasons which will 
appear later, it could not have been the summer 
of 1901, afford evidence to ^x the date fairly ac- 
curately. 

Ford had a beautiful lady with him when we 
met in London Wall. I was not introduced, but 
she considerably distracted my attention. And 
as Eichmond is reasonably certain that the lady 
must have been Miss Worthington, it may be in- 
teresting to record a brief impression of my one 
glimpse of her. She was tall, taller than Ford, 
and fair ; and her features had the wonderful ef- 
fect of being chiselled or modelled with the care- 
ful art of a realist sculptor — the effect which is 



A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 39 

hardly ever found in the pretty women of the 
lower and middle classes in England. I certainly 
took her for an aristocrat, and worshipped her 
image for a time. She took not the least notice 
of me, I remember ; no doubt she resented my in- 
terruption of her conversation with Ford. 

I should probably not have recognised him if 
he had not hailed me by name. He had shaved 
his beard and moustache, and he looked younger 
than my acquaintance of three years before. He 
instantly remembered me, and, moreover, all the 
circumstances of our first meeting. ^'You prom- 
ised to write,'' he reminded me. ^^I suppose you 
lost my address?" 

And that remark led to one of the real situa- 
tions which one can use in fiction, inasmuch as my 
characteristic inability to tell the easy untruth on 
such occasions was quite a factor in my further 
intimacy with Ford. My stammering reply to the 
effect that I still had his address in my pocket, 
that I had meant and wanted to write, and that I 
had been, as usual, a ^^ rotten slacker," quick- 
ened his interest in me to the point of making 
an appointment at the Cafe Nero in the Wool Ex- 
change, for the following day. I chose the ren- 
dezvous. And he told me there that my rather 
elaborate honesty and self-condemnation had 
piqued his curiosity. 

Nevertheless, our friendship ripened very 
slowly. I met him three or four times in the next 
nine months, always at the same place ; and I was 
intensely interested in him, but I regarded him as 



40 W. E. FORD 

a rather superior being, and felt that it was not 
for me to suggest such further intimacies as, say, 
a long evening's conversation at his rooms or 
mine. 

Then in the summer of 1901, I entered upon 
what I now recognise as the second phase of my 
life. The development of the phase was gradual, 
but the change of interests and associations was 
instant; and drastic enough in certain ways to 
throw my acquaintance with Ford momentarily 
into the background. I did not forget him, but 
I forgot to meet him. Also my employer moved 
his offices from Moorgate Street to Bedford 
Square in the spring of that year, and my as- 
sociations with Ford were, save for our first meet- 
ing, all connected with the great underground 
cafe in the Wool Exchange building. 

I must, however, note one strange anomaly by 
the way. When I was in the City, as I have said, 
I met Ford by chance in London Wall, although 
I rarely went down that street and he was there 
by the merest accident. Now, during the whole 
of 1902 Ford was living within half a mile of the 
office in which I was working, constantly passed 
it and spent a great part of his time in the British 
Museum, which I, in my turn, passed at least twice 
every day in my walk from my room in Montague 
Street to my office in Bedford Square. And yet, 
during those twelve months, I never once caught 
sight of him. The facts of life are so improbable. 

The causes that led to our next meeting were 
not, strictly speaking, fortuitous. I had remem- 



A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 41 

bered his Bloomsbury address all this time, al- 
though I had neither written to him nor been to 
see him. My lack of enterprise in this case, how- 
ever, is quite expHcable. I had an exigeante * ' in- 
terest" that occupied all my spare time. 

But I have come to a period of my own life 
that even now, after a lapse of more than eleven 
years, I recall with very considerable distaste. 
I do not propose to enter into that history; but I 
may explain that I left my job as an architect's 
assistant at the end of September, 1903, and joined 
the New York Life Insurance Company as an 
agent; that I was married for the first time in 
November of the same year and went to live in a 
flat in Buckingham Gate; and that early in 1904, 
in a desperate search for probable ^* cases," I re- 
membered Ford and wrote to him on the off 
chance of finding in him a willing and insurable 
risk. The address found him, as he had returned 
then to his old rooms in Bloomsbury. I suppose 
I mentioned my object in writing to him; I am 
sure that I did not insure him. I was always too 
bitterly ashamed of my occupation to press even 
the most likely ''case" among my acquaintances. 

I have been drawn into these apparently irrele- 
vant details of autobiography by my attempt to 
recover a true sense of my early relations with 
Ford; the phase that lasted, almost unchanged, 
until the winter of 1911-1912, when he was home 
again in Golden Square after spending six months 
in India. During all this period we met infre- 
quently. There were enormous intervals due to 



42 W. E. FORD 

the adventures of the various life which beset me 
when I, finally, broke away from the shackles of 
my office routine. But whenever we did meet my 
attitude towards him remained that of pupil to 
master — an attitude that I learned later was the 
real obstacle between us. 

In those days I failed completely to understand 
him. I put him too high, and never once realised 
that my reverence irked and a little dismayed him. 
And so I have found it impossible to explain my 
impressions of that time without first laying stress 
on my own weakness. For it was not Ford whom 
I knew, but my own thought of him; and my 
thought was a false one. I used to go to him for 
advice, as a pious spinster goes to her parish 
priest; and like the spinster, I was always at- 
tempting to win admiration by a confession of 
weakness. I was the victim of that common ro- 
mantic ideal which seeks to create the illusion of 
absolutes. Conscious of my own inabilities, I tried 
to find in Ford the absolute strength and wis- 
dom, in order that I might shift the responsibility 
of my life to his ordinance. I went to him for ad- 
vice, and if he had given me a rule I should have 
obeyed it. 

I remember very vividly the last instance of 
those visits to my lay confessional ; a visit made 
at a time when things were going very badly in- 
deed with me. Ford was married then and liv- 
ing at his school in Holland Park. I think I must 
have written to him and made an appointment. 
I know that after a few minutes in the drawing- 



A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 43 

room he took me upstairs to his own study. I 
have always had an idea that Mrs. Ford did not 
like me.^ I certainly never made any of my con- 
fessions in her presence, and assmned — with good 
justification, I believe — that they were never re- 
ported to her by Ford himself. 

My financial and marital complications were 
rapidly becoming disastrous, and I put them be- 
fore Ford in the tentative, half-despairing man- 
ner that was symptomatic of my condition just 
then ; finding a salve, even while I complained, in 
his quick, sympathetic interest. But when I came 
to a pause, he got up and began to pace the little 
length of his study. He had decided to make an 
end of these old relations between us, not for any 
selfish reason, but simply because he believed that 
I might still save my life from wreck. And his 
first sentence put the whole situation before me 
in the fewest possible words. 

' ' You must be God, ' ' he said. ^ ' / can 't. ' ' 

But I was not quick enough to grasp the full 
significance of that, and the explanation that fol- 
lowed was, in one sense, of quite peculiar inter- 
est. For he told me, some four years later, that 
during the elaboration of that simple, intuitive 
statement of his, he approached for the first time 
the primitive conception of that philosophy which 
I hope, however imperfectly, to indicate in a fur- 
ther chapter. 

No doubt my memory of his first exposition is 
confused now with many subsequent conversa- 

* Mrs. Ford denies this. — K. K. 



44 W. E. FORD 

tions, but I remember the effect that his talk had 
upon me, and it seems worth while to attempt 
some reproduction of his advice. 

He began by censuring my inhibitions. I was 
all for sacrifice at that time. I had made a mis- 
take in my first marriage, and my single idea was 
not so much to make the best of it as to penalise 
myself for having been a fool. I believed that I 
was being a little splendid by patiently suffering 
the effects of my folly. 

Ford told me that I was denying God; that 
every time I suppressed my inclination to resent 
the lash, I was weakening a natural impulse. And 
the effect of that, he said, was even worse for my 
wife than it was for myself; since I encouraged 
her natural cruelty, when by resistance, by a free 
expression of my impulsive reactions, I might 
stimulate in her a free response to other com- 
plexes. She could not be ^ ^ all-cruel, ^ ' he said, the 
thing was unthinkable ; but by my feeble submis- 
sions I was developing that side of her character 
out of all proportion. 

Then he went on to urge that what I regarded 
as a fine ideal of self-sacrifice might be, in ef- 
fect, nothing more than a sop for my moral cow- 
ardice. Would it not need a greater effort on my 
part, he asked, to go boldly home and admit to 
my wife that I no longer loved her? Would it 
not need more courage, more self-control, to speak 
the whole truth, than it would to endure my pres- 
ent misery with a show of meekness? If you 



A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 45 

really want to sacrifice yourself, choose the hard- 
est way, was the summary of his argument. 

I believe that talk of his was the beginning of 
many things for him, but while he was speaking 
he had no thought for anything but me. As his 
manner was on those occasions, he constantly 
looked up at me quickly, earnestly, and yet with 
an air that was a trifle abstracted, as if his physi- 
cal approach of sight was no more than a mechani- 
cal aid to his spiritual approach. He used to find 
some inner contact with one in those more earnest 
moments of his. He reached out and entered one 's 
mind. And he read me so clearly and effectively 
on this particular occasion, that he was able to 
build a philosophy out of the experience gained 
by his instant's surrender to another personality. 
He reached my thought and then stood back to 
prescribe for me. 

At the last, he completed his effort by giving 
me something of his own confidence. He told me 
that he believed I should '^ come through." The 
phrase remained with me, for I made it a watch- 
word ; although with a quick turn that was a trifle 
whimsical, he went on at once : ^' If it is ourselves 
that come through, and not the universal behind 
us?'' I cannot pretend to remember his precise 
words but the intention is that which he conveyed 
to my mind. He went on to question how far 
this complex that we recognise as our personality 
may be merely a means for the expression of some 
universal that continually seeks to be delivered. 

I went home wonderfully conscious that I was 



46 W. E. FORD 

an agent for the deliverance of eternal truth ; and 
if the purpose of my endeavour failed grievously 
when the exhilaration of new knowledge had spent 
itself in conflict with the insistent realities of my 
condition, I had, as it were, opened another line 
of communication with God. 

To that extent Ford influenced my life, and 
justified my belief in the Destiny which planned 
our first two meetings with such fastidious un- 
concern. But after I had received the intended 
stimulus, Destiny shrugged its shoulders and left 
me, so far as Ford was concerned, to take any 
further initiative on my own account. 

We did not meet again for four years, and dur- 
ing the interval I had entered upon my ^' third 
phase, ^' the phase that still endures. 

It was in November, 1911, that I got a letter 
from Ford, sent on by my publishers, congratulat- 
ing me on my book. The Hampdenshire Won- 
der. I have kept that letter, and it now lies 
open before me, but I cannot very well quote it 
in full. When Ford found occasion for praise, his 
enthusiasm shone out with no shadow of qualifi- 
cation. Also, there was an element of pleased sur- 
prise in this particular expression of his — he must 
have been more than a little astonished at the 
evidence of my having ''come through" so soon. 
Nevertheless, because no one but Ford ever saw 
and stated definitely my half -realised purpose in 
writing The Hampdenshire Wonder, I will copy 
out just that part of his eulogy which made me 
glad to have made the attempt. 



A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 47 

**It has got there completely so far as I am 
concerned/' he wrote. ^*In detail it satisfies in- 
numerable instincts, mathematical, metaphysical, 
psychological, and so on . . . and in general it 
does what very few books have done — Stevenson 's 
Jekyll and Hyde is one — abstracts one of the fun- 
damental antinomies of human life, drives the 
paradox to the extreme conceivable limit without 
loss of the necessary degree of credibility, and — 
leaves the moral to be inferred. The practical re- 
sult is material for fruitful thought, and we can't 
thank a man for any better gift." 

A little further down he completes my own feel- 
ing of purpose, by congratulating me on **a cer- 
tain sense of half contact with the illimitable/' 
that I had somehow managed to achieve in the 
book he was praising. 

If I had never met Ford and had had no other 
letter from him than this one, I should have known 
that he had a rare gift of understanding. It 
may be, of course, that in the old days of our in- 
tercourse he realised something in me of which I 
myself was quite unaware, and so saw through 
the book to the author. But if that be the explana- 
tion it still credits him with a most unusual power 
of insight, inasmuch as no one else believed in 
me during that ^'second phase." 

We met several times that winter in Golden 
Square, and twice he came up to our tiny flat 
in Willesden Lane. We had suddenly become 
equals and could talk. For Ford, himself, could 
talk as an equal with any man, from the most 



48 W. E. FORD 

brutal uneducated to the ripest philosopher, and it 
was only such as I, and as my antithesis the com- 
placent overbearing, who set up the obstacle of 
difference. 

It will be evident from this brief account of my 
relations with Ford how little I knew of his per- 
sonal history. All that far more interesting mat- 
ter will be set out by Mr. Kichmond, who knew 
the man and his habits of thought so intimately. 
But what I have been attempting is to prelude the 
historical, mobile account of Ford's life with an 
impression that would be relatively reflective and 
static. When I began my contribution I intended 
to describe Ford as I would describe a character in 
a novel ; I thought that I would try to make a pic- 
ture of him by setting down his characteristic 
tricks of phrase and gesture, and perhaps work 
in a suggestive anecdote or two. When I had 
actually begun my task, I realised that this was 
not my part of the collaboration, it was Eich- 
mond's. And now it seems to me that I have 
written much of myself and very little of Ford. 
The reflex must be found in a consideration of op- 
posites ; in the thought of a man who was not in- 
trospective; and was not concerned with the ef- 
fect of life upon himself, but with his hope to 
affect life. 

All writers of fiction are to some extent charla- 
tans, and most of them are aware of the fact. In- 
trospection inevitably leads to self-consciousness 
and hypocrisy. The antithesis is found in the 
man who does not examine his own motives ; and 



A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 49 

Ford came nearer to the ideal in this kind than 
any one I have ever met. I told him, once — only 
a few weeks before he left England on his fateful 
journey to Japan — that he completely begged the 
question of his own character; that he was an a 
priorist in living. He thought that over for a 
couple of seconds before he replied, and then 
said, ^*Yes, I dare say that's true. I certainly 
know less of myself than I do of many of 
my friends. I don 't find myself interesting. ' ' And 
for that reason, although he found the whole of 
the rest of life quite absorbingly interesting, be 
would never have made a novelist or a writer of 
philosophy. For a man must be on the friendliest 
terms with himself before he can make the ab- 
stract which is necessary to both these avocations. 
Ford did not deal in crystallisations. He had no 
inclination for that integration of the various 
through the alembic of his own microcosm. He 
kept his vision of life fluid, and many people 
blamed him as lacking in consideration. His whole 
tendency was synthetic. And that process I have 
described, with no intention of preserving an ac- 
curate chemical analogy, as * ^ crystallisation, ' ' ne- 
cessitates separation, analysis. 

Indeed, I think that his treatment of me on 
that last occasion of our unequal contact in ther 
parts of penitent and confessor, is, on the whole, 
respectably typical of his method with life. An- 
other man in his place would have tested my case 
on his own character. He would have asked him- 
self, "What should I do in such circumstances?'' 



50 W. E. FORD 

Ford's only criterion was what lie knew of my 
disposition and abilities. He tried to project him- 
self into my mind, and I feel that he almost won- 
derfully succeeded. 

One result of that characteristic of his was that 
a majority of his casual acquaintances regarded 
Ford as rather an egotist. He was, as a matter of 
fact, a selfless rather than an unselfish man. He 
was so unselfconscious, both in giving and taking, 
that I cannot imagine him deliberately sacrific- 
ing himself to give pleasure. The mere act of de- 
liberation would imply in that case the choice and 
acceptance of a part, and he never postured. It 
was, so to speak, almost an accident that he gave 
pleasure rather than pain to his friends; it hap- 
pened that his essential attitude was one of inter- 
est rather than one of criticism. 

And my last excuse for the manner of this chap- 
ter may rest on the fact that I have tried to show 
what kind of man — as a single instance among 
many kinds — could engage and hold his interest. 
I feel an urgent desire to praise him for not 
wearying of me. I believe that his comprehension 
of me is a splendid testimonial for his abilities 
as an educationist and a sociologist. 

For the rest, I have spoken of his other claims 
to a wide attention both in my first chapter and in 
the collocation of various notes I made on the 
broader scheme of philosophy he was just begin- 
ning, to outline when he died. In the latter, more 
especially, will be found much that is a clue to his 
general character. I leave it to Mr. Richmond to 



A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 51 

give a completer study of Ford's life, and hope 
that that study will not contradict my statement 
in any important particular. Nevertheless, if an- 
other reading should show him in other, and ap- 
parently almost irreconcilable, aspects, the fact 
will only serve to prove that my estimate is a 
true one. Ford's ^^selflessness" will bear many 
translations. 



PART TWO 
A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 



PART TWO 

A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 

CHAPTER IV 

The biographer of a famous or notorious charac- 
ter has to deal with an advantage and a disadvan- 
tage combined. The advantage is that he starts 
in rapport with the reader over a certain popular 
conception of his subject; the disadvantage is that 
this is always more or less of a misconception, 
since the public man who does not wear a mask 
of set intention is always fitted with a mask by 
the public. And it is a risky undertaking, as 
Beresford has hinted, to lift the mask. As I set 
myself to write down the main details of Ford's 
life, I am glad that there is no popular picture of 
him, no accepted set of flat, easy generalisations 
about his character and his point of view, such as 
a biographer is usually obliged partly to qualify, 
partly to dramatise. But I am more than glad 
to have Beresford 's picture instead — ^not the com- 
posite photograph of a public impression, mud- 
dled and fluffy at the edges as composite photo- 
graphs are, but a single impression of Ford as he 
appeared to a single friend. Not too much of a 

55 



56 W. E. FORD 

friend, either; Beresford can look at Ford from 
a sufficient distance to see ronnd him. I cannot; 
Ford is part of me and will remain so, and I can 
bring myself to use my closer acquaintance with 
him only to set down, very objectively, the facts 
of his unpretentious career. 

The young man of twenty-seven whom Beres- 
ford encountered on that Diamond Jubilee even- 
ing at Shepperton owed something of the dis- 
tinctive quality with which he always impressed 
an acquaintance, to an upbringing that by force 
of circumstances had been in many ways unusual, 
and could not have failed to give him an outlook 
and a mould of thought different from those of the 
average young Englishman. He owed still more 
to the character and influence of his father. Paul 
Ford was by choice and temperament a scientist ; 
by profession he was a consulting engineer who 
specialised in mining work. This calling took him 
much abroad, and his young wife chose to accom- 
pany him upon his longer travels. To judge by 
Ford's account of his father's description of her, 
and by a photograph that he has shown me, his 
mother was a woman of great beauty, little 
physique, and high spirit. She had broken off an 
engagement de convenance at the eleventh hour 
to elope with Paul Ford, and had at once gone with 
him to South America, where he had many 
months' work to do. By the time they were ready 
to return to England the birth of their child was 
imminent, and was eagerly looked forward to as 
the crowniug of their romance; they decided to 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 57 

await the event at Valparaiso. Here William 
Ford was born at the cost of his mother's life. 

Paul Ford had at first to overcome a resentful 
hatred for his baby, but he came later to focus 
upon the growing child all his affections and 
ambitions. He had been greatly interested, even 
before the prospect of fatherhood had given the 
matter personal significance, in the methods of 
paternal training by which Karl Witte in Ger- 
many, and John Stuart Mill and Lord Kelvin in 
Britain, had become not youthful prodigies so 
much as youths with an exceptionally fine start 
in the handicap of life; and he and his wife had 
taken especial pains, during the months preceding 
William's birth, to discover the secret enshrouded 
in the elder Witte 's unsatisfactory writings.^ It 
may be that this consistent thinking about educa- 
tion exercised a pre-natal influence upon William 
Ford, and accounts in some degree for the innate 
faculty for teaching which he was to possess; 
but much also was due to his recollection of his 
father's methods in teaching him. The child ac- 
companied Paul Ford upon most of his travels, 
and his young perceptions were exercised over a 
very exceptional range of childish experience — 
far too wide a range for the budding intelligence, 
if his father had not continually enticed him to 
track down simple generalisations through all the 
diversity of detail. 

* Witte 's book is prolix and desultory ; a recent edition in English 
has been cleverly edited and compressed by Mr. Addington Bruce. 
{The Education of Karl Witte-. Harrap, 1915.) 



58 W. E. FORD 

I often wish I could have known Ford as a child. 
I have seen letters that his father wrote to him at 
school, answering some childish question, or, more 
often, pointing the way to the boy^s own discovery 
of the answer ; and they give a reflected picture of 
the young Ford as the most naively engaging of 
young philosophers. Paul Ford had felt bound 
to try the reluctant experiment of sending him to 
school. The first attempt failed promptly. A 
preparatory school of some repute proved to be 
infected with perversion, and the boy ran away 
in disgusted alarm, taking refuge (his father was 
abroad) with a soldier uncle. This worthy was 
merely scandalised at the indiscipline of such a 
flight, and received Paul Ford's cabled interdic- 
tion of his son's return to the school with the 
gloomiest misgivings. Ford's chief reminiscence 
of the weeks that ensued before his father's re- 
turn concerns the horror of his uncle on discover- 
ing his ignorance of the Shorter Catechism — a 
horror intensified by his frank criticism of this 
compilation when it was brought to his notice. 
Paul Ford was later accused by his brother of 
*^ turning a nice kid into a damned young prig"; 
the nice kid had this arraignment verbatim from 
his father as a warning to be more considerate in 
his conversations with military uncles and their 
like. 

The opinion should be adjoined, for fair con- 
trast, of the retired bishop ^ who prepared Ford 
for confirmation a year or so later. (Paul Ford 

^Dr. Ogilvie. 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 59 

always obeyed to the letter, so far as he could 
conceive them, the wishes of his dead wife.) The 
ex-bishop, himself a bit of a naturalist in the 
roomy, discursive manner often affected by the 
Victorian cleric, was greatly pleased by the boy's 
readiness to connect spiritual teaching with nat- 
ural fact, and was so delighted over a childish 
analogy between prayer and electrical induction, 
that he might almost be said to have passed his 
candidate upon the strength of that alone. 

Before this event another school had been given 
a three terms' trial. Here Ford was untroubled, 
not unhappy, but — ^bored. His mind, by now so 
thoroughly awake, found little to work upon; he 
lost way, intellectually, and also came back to his 
father with so many barriers of conventional 
schoolboy reticence to be patiently removed before 
their rare comradeship could be reinstated, that 
Paul Ford eventually decided that schools were, 
in his case at least, a mistake. *^ Mental and 
physical tanneries" he called them — for, besides 
obfuscation of mind, his boy had had to endure 
the usual irrelevant flagellations. The majority 
of schoolmasters have learnt better since those 
days in the matter of bodily if not of intellectual 
mishandling. 

It would not be true to say that Ford grew up to 
young manhood simply and singly the product of 
his father's training. Paul Ford seems to have 
been by instinct a believer in self-developed voli- 
tion rather than imposed habit as the basis of 
character, and the stages of the boy's adolescence 



60 W. E. FORD 

were marked by steps of progressive liberation 
from leading-strings. He became more and more 
self -educating. There was a time when he became 
conscious that interesting and lucrative work was 
being refused because the surroundings — a min- 
ing camp in Arizona — would not have been edify- 
ing for a growing boy ; he felt himself a clog, and 
made some self-accusing remark to that effect. 
^*It^s all right, old man,'* said his father, ^* you 're 
gradually taking yourself off my hands.'' In a 
sense, too, the boy's increasing emancipation of 
mind appears to have been due to the father's 
growing uncertainty in prescribing for him. With 
an engineer's precision of mind Paul Ford hated 
to act without a clear plan, and he refused to im- 
pose his will or his views arbitrarily unless he 
could back them up by a clean-cut, rational ex- 
planation. 

For much the same reason Ford's acquisition 
of book-learning at this time was oddly casual, al- 
most incidental. The actual teaching that he had 
from his father was erratic, irregular and dis- 
cursive, though very much alive. Its unquestion- 
able success in making him not only an eager but 
a patient and a thorough student of any subject 
that he took up is hard to explain. Perhaps the 
example of Paul Ford's masterly thoroughness 
over his own work had its influence. But it seems 
also that while he always left the boy to do his 
own spadework on his own responsibility, he took 
every care to see him provided first with an effi- 
cient spade. Knowing himself to be very rusty in 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 61 

Greek, lie engaged a tutor to give William a thor- 
ough grounding — and then, dissatisfied with the 
result, himself made a rapid study of Greek 
grammar, applied to it a scientific classification 
of his own devising, and devoted the period of a 
sea-voyage to the intensive culture of his son's 
acquaintance with language-structure in general, 
as compared with Greek in particular. A year 
later, at the age of seventeen, Ford could read a 
Greek play with ease and appreciation.^ 

I can recall no other very definite detail from 
Ford's description of his father's teaching. The 
whole process was not so much a formulated sys- 
tem, with distinct points of method that could be 
classified under so many heads, as the natural, 
organic outcome of a unique personal relationship. 
The open, easy comradeship of the two was the 
basic fact, and with this assured they could afford 
to take an empiric line in matters of detail. Of 
Paul Ford's more general influence upon the char- 
acter and the later tendencies of his son, there are 
two quite definite things to be said which, I think, 
partly explain two of Ford's fundamental charac- 
teristics as a man. 

One of these was his curious view of personal 
ambition. His father was intensely ambitious for 
him, and they talked much of possible careers. 
But with his scientific sincerity and his consider- 
able knowledge of the world's ways, Paul Ford 

* This is an isolated case, but it goes to support the contention 
of some educators that the boy who begins Greek at twelve gets 
no further in five years than the point that can be reached in a 
year by the boy who begins at sixteen. 



62 W. E. FORD 

could not but emphasize the large if varying 
degrees of humbug that are necessary for most 
kinds of professional succe&s ; and he would dwell, 
as a corollary, upon the mental clouding, mud- 
dling, and sophistication that he declared to be 
necessary (and to be duly effected in schools) to 
prevent this general atmosphere of humbug from 
disquieting the intellectual and moral conscience. 
* ^ You need a thoroughly muddled conscience to be 
an honest business man, nowadays," he would 
say as he looked through some engineering con- 
tract upon which his advice had been asked. Clear 
vision, he maintained, combined with even a mod- 
erate sense of social responsibility, definitely dis- 
qualified its possessor for success under the com- 
petitive system. (Later, Ford always held that 
the competitive system in Western civilisation has 
outlived its usefulness.) It was only natural that 
the boy should grow up with a high and an ac- 
cumulating potential of ambition, but with an in- 
creasing tendency to mistrust the usual outlets; 
and that he should eventually emerge with a 
philosophy of ambition far removed from that 
which is conventionally sanctioned — upheld and 
protected, indeed — ^by the common instinct for 
mutual defence among self-seekers in a self-seek- 
ing world. 

The second of Ford's characteristics that I trace 
back to a source in the influence of his father's 
personality is his unusual outlook upon the 
phenomena of trouble, pain, and grief. Paul 
Ford's sorrow for the wife whom he had lost 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 63 

never grew less. He hid it with courage and 
cheerfulness, but in such an intimacy as was 
theirs, his son could not but be conscious of a 
deeply underlying sense of tragedy. William 
Ford as I knew him seemed possessed of some 
inexplicable solvent for grief, his own or that of 
others, though he never explained — I do not think 
he could have explained — what its nature was. 

William was to go to Cambridge. His father 
purposed to keep him till he was twenty, knowing 
that it was easier for a boy to take his own line in 
undergraduate life if he were a little older than 
most ^^men^' of his year. But when William was 
nineteen Paul Ford, then in Central Russia with 
his son, was struck down by plague and died in 
three days. The boy was stunned. He has de- 
scribed himself as feeling no passion of sorrow, 
either at the time or during the dreary and soli- 
tary trans-continental journey home, but rather 
as being conscious of a supreme struggle going 
on within himself against fatalism and hopeless- 
ness. Only in dreams, he has told me, he would 
break down, waking to find his pillow wet with 
tears. Once he dreamed that he was his father, 
weeping upon his mother's grave; and the dream 
for some obscure reason brought him great com- 
fort. 

His going to Cambridge was first postponed and 
finally prevented by financial troubles. The 
trusted family solicitor who had the handling of 
Paul Ford's estate, being himself at a climax of 
long accumulating difficulties, risked the money in 



64 W. E. FORD 

unsafe securities, lost the greater part of it, and 
barely escaped bankruptcy and prosecution — 
partly through Ford's eagerness for a comprom- 
ise that would give the man (with his accounts, for 
the future, under supervision) another chance. 
Ford was left with the prospect of forty pounds 
a year on his majority, and the hope that this 
amount might increase with the gradual straight- 
ening out of the crooked business. 

His military uncle, retired by this time and on 
half pay, was in no position to play Providence; 
but he bestirred himself to obtain for Ford the of- 
fer of a clerkship in the bank where he had for long 
kept a modest account, and further proposed that 
his nephew should live with him. This plan put 
Ford in a difficult position. It was prompted by 
sentiment, and by the sense of duty of his only 
surviving relation, rather than by spontaneous 
inclination; the old Major tried but failed to dis- 
guise his fears that the disarrangement of his set 
ways would amount to an upheaval; and Ford 
himself was sure that neither he nor his uncle 
would be happy. On the other hand, the senti- 
mental factor was strong in a boy of nineteen, 
who was reluctant to meet a generous proposal 
with a clumsy refusal that must needs give pain ; 
he felt confident of his ability to adapt himself, 
although against the grain, to his uncle's indu- 
rated outlook; and he was feeling very lonely, 
and in a mood to welcome the most cross-grained 
companionship, the least vital link with the life 
that had been shattered for him, rather than none 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 65 

at all. Also, it was security that was offered to 
him, a bulwark of a kind against adversity, as 
compared with the rather desperate adventure of 
trying to establish his own footing at a moment 
when sickness of heart somewhat obscured the 
venturous spirit natural to his temperament and 
to his time of life. 

I have often admired Ford, the grown man 
whom I knew, at one crisis or another of his life, 
but I am not sure that my admiration does not 
go out most heartily to the youth whom I never 
knew, except in terms of the man's half -humorous, 
self-quizzical reminiscences in the course of an 
evening's talk — the youth who decided to take his 
grief with him out into the world, and to prove 
in himself alone the value of the equipment with 
which his dead father had provided him. 

He was of course staying with his uncle at the 
time, and the announcement of his decision led 
to an interminable discussion that stood for him, 
in later life, as the prototype of all useless argu- 
ment. If there was one thing that he always hated 
it was unreasoning obstinacy, but this he found 
to be his sole anchor. His uncle asked again and 
again for an explanation of his reasons, and each 
time ignored every point of the explanation as it 
was patiently re-elaborated. He stated and re- 
stated his own view without rationale and without 
variation, ever and again coming back to the same 
opening — ^^But, my dear boy, what reason can 
you have . . . f It became a crude contest of 
wills, and Ford won. It is to the Major's credit 



66 W. E. FORD 

that he bore no malice; he remained upon affec- 
tionate, if never upon intimate, terms with his 
nephew until his death. 

Ford became an assistant master in a private 
school at which I was a pupil — this was the ger- 
minal beginning of my acquaintance with him. 
Having no degree, nor even public school creden- 
tials, he commanded a salary of £45 a year. Talk- 
ing to me of this time, in after years, he could not 
say how far his choice of a profession was the 
result of an instinct, how far due to lack of al- 
ternatives. The instinct must have been present, to 
judge by the remarkable talent for teaching that 
he displayed from the very first. He has told me 
that as a schoolboy he continually found himself 
criticising and taking mental notes to the tune of 
^^When I'm a man, I won't teach like that,'' and 
this might suggest the notion that he had even 
then some unconscious premonition of his future ; 
but since to be a man meant, for the boy Ford, to 
be a man like his father, it is likely that his boyish 
mind had only compared his master's teaching 
unfavourably with his father's, and drew the nat- 
ural conclusion as to which type of educating 
grown-up he would prefer to become. 

At all events he knew well enough how not to 
handle a class, and avoided all the usual pitfalls ; 
we youngsters placed him at once as a man who 
knew his business, apart from the fact that a 
lessoji with him was as refreshing as a spring 
in the desert. For his method, and especially for 
his rare grasp of the art of subject-presentation 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 67 

(an art of whose existence, even, a majority of 
schoolmasters remain unaware), he must have 
been largely indebted to his father; he has told 
me that his first depression at our stifling inca- 
pacity for the simplest process of thought, and 
at the flat, stale tedium that flavoured the school 
as a whole, was overcome chiefly by a fierce pietas 
that made him burn to prove, if only to himself, 
the rightness and the communicability of his 
father's conception of knowledge as a privilege 
and a joy. His instinct was not long in showing 
him the way to make us share his vision. When 
I cast my mind back to the experience of being 
taught by him, in those early days when his 
method as a teacher was almost wholly a matter 
of instinct, it seems to me little wonder that later 
experience and self -training made him an excep- 
tional exponent of the art of education. 

In the first lesson of a term's course he usually 
gave us little to do but listen, unless one or other 
of us let his attention wander, when Ford would 
recall the truant with a beckoning question. Lean- 
ing over his desk, his eyes unveiled and looking, 
it seemed, through the wall behind us into some 
clear distance, he would map out the line of work 
upon which we were going to embark. He held 
out no baits : ^ ^ You '11 find that part fairly stiff, ' ' 
was often his comment after outlining an attrac- 
tive section of his programme. When we, in 
imagination, were already engaged upon the de- 
tailed struggles that he had promised us, he would 
begin to open up vistas. At this point, our subject 



68 W. E. FORD 

led into regions of history, at that, into a world 
of scientific miracles ; its development had been a 
long, exciting business of human exploration and 
discovery; gradually a sense grew upon us of its 
place and value in the sum total of thought and 
knowledge. 

Then — we felt the moment coming — he would 
push himself back from his desk and begin a slow, 
measured walk between the window and the black- 
board. There is no possibility of describing one's 
childish memory what it was that he said as he 
walked. He spoke as though to himself, creating 
no deliberate glamour, searching for simple words 
in which to clothe his conviction that some trite 
school subject had its note to sound in the music 
of the spheres. At its simplest it was, as a whole, 
hopelessly above our heads ; as method, the later 
Ford would have condemned it out of hand; but 
we listened for all we were worth, piecing to- 
gether what we could. It seemed for the moment 
the most desirable thing in heaven or earth to be 
able, some day, to see arithmetic or geography as 
Ford saw it. And later in the term, when some 
^'fairly stiff part'' of the work stood up, stark 
and inexorable, to be tackled, we went for it with 
little beguiling or driving. It was all part of the 
big business — Ford's phrase, to us, for the cosmic 
scheme — and if we stuck or shirked at times, a 
casual-seeming word or two from him would recall 
the wide vision and the childish impulse towards 
its realisation. 

His actual treatment and illustration of details 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 69 

were always concrete and objective; we learned 
from him to turn the closest and most unremitting 
scrutiny upon facts and things; but in the last 
analysis it was always an abstraction with which 
he made us fall in love. His wide knowledge fas- 
cinated us ; but whenever any of us had come hot- 
foot upon some fresh question, our distinctive de- 
sire was to find out what Ford thought about it, 
rather than what he knew. Theory never came 
from his hands in heavy lumps, but sprang 
straight into flight, to be followed eagerly to the 
limit of our vision. And it was never as his own 
theory that he insisted upon it. ** Here's an idea; 
see it fly ! ' ' was his attitude. Many of the people 
who have been disappointed in him personally, 
feeling that he never gave fully of his personality, 
but always withdrew elusively from human con- 
tacts, have never seen the meaning of his positive 
passion for truth. We youngsters realised it, in 
our childish way. He propped a truth upon his 
own authority, his own reputation with us, for the 
first moment only ; the next moment he had left it 
hovering before its flight in the air before us, and 
had joined us as a spectator. 

Perhaps the most distinct picture that he leaves 
in a schoolboy's memory is of his expression, half 
anxious, half whimsical, when he had failed to get 
an idea to soar at all for our slow-moving little 
minds. He was like an elder boy trying to fly for 
us a kite that persisted in diving back to earth. 
He would stand baffled for seconds, then he would 
be at us again with one ingenious device after 



70 W. E. FORD 

another to make the thing rise. ^ ' Look here ; this 
is a silly instance of what I mean, ' * he would begin 
— and proceed to tack on the wildest illustration, 
often wild to the verge of absurdity. He seldom 
failed to get his kite up by one expedient or 
another. 

He seemed to have no methods of discipline; 
the need did not arise. There was no time to rag 
in his form, and no scope for idleness or stupidity. 
The latter failing he simply declined to recognise. 
If you could not understand a thing one way, he 
would put it to you in another. He seemed to 
have come to a private intellectual understanding 
with each of us alike, and we realised dimly that 
every point had its individual aspect for each one 
of us. While he was engaged in penetrating some 
particular density of Smith minor *s, the rest of us 
were engrossed to discover what new light upon 
the subject would accrue in the process. If he was 
keen to give us an idea of the unity of all theory, 
he also made us conscious of the many-sidedness 
of all fact. Ideas flocked too thickly in his class- 
room for crime and punishment to find breathing 
space. It was different when we passed on to the 
thin droning of another master; then it was paper 
pellets that furtively and inevitably thronged the 
air, and impositions were rife. 

The head-master, knowing that he had a tyro on 
his hands, would come in at times and listen to 
Ford^s teaching with vague disapproval. On one 
occasion he broke in upon a lesson in which Ford 
was inciting us, in a common effort, to express a 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 71 

simple story in French, and stood the class out 
in a row to demonstrate how French should be 
taught. Ford waited in polite boredom for the 
infliction to cease. ^ ' What is the definite article ? ' ' 
asked the headmaster. None of us could tell him. 
^^They must learn the simple elements first/' he 
threw over his shoulder to Ford, and then to us, 
^^The definite article is le — la — les. Repeat it.'' 
**LEK — LAK — LAY," wc chorussed. ^^ Genitive, du 
— de la — des. Repeat that." ^'doo — dlak — day." 

* ^ Dative, au — a la — anx. Repeat that. " * ^ o — alar 
— o." ^^Now repeat all three cases with me." He 
led the chorus, and we followed him: '^ler — lar 

lay; DOO DLAR DAY; O ALAR O. " '^Vcry 

good; now again." We gave the encore. ^^Now 
by yourselves." We obliged, each with a suflB- 
cient approximation to the nine mysterious and 
unexplained sounds to pass muster in the crowd. 

* ^ There ! " He turned to Ford. * ^ Now they know 
that." The incident symbolised much for Ford. 
Incidentally the memory" of it gave him a phrase 
that he often used in talking to me, in later years 
— * ^ doodarday knowledge. ' ' 

He recalled a priceless bit of criticism by this 
head-master, when the latter was lecturing him in 
private upon his shortcomings. **You must teach 
them facts — teach them facts. Teaching as you 
do it, is only putting ideas into the boys' heads." 

Ford remained in this school for a year, and 
then resigned the post, feeling that he had reached 
a point from which, in those surroundings, he 
could get no further forward. It was character- 



72 W. E. FORD 

istic of him that he sought another mastership 
without having asked for a reference from his late 
chief, although that gentleman's opinion had been 
largely modified by Ford's popularity with the 
boys and the impression, consequent and subse- 
quent, that was made upon the parents. Indeed, 
I can remember his speaking quite feelingly to 
my own father of the gap left by Ford's depart- 
ure, and there can have been no fear that his 
testimonial would have been other than friendly. 
Also, almost any testimonial would have been bet- 
ter, commercially, than none. I once heard Ford's 
view of the matter by accident, when we had been 
talking about old times at the school. ^^What sort 
of a reference did Marshall give you?" I asked. 
*^ Never asked him for one," said Ford. ^'Why 
not?" ^^Well . . . you see, he would have given 
me a better one than I could possibly have given 
him." The fine shade is typical of a number of 
Ford's actions and inactions. I sometimes won- 
der whether, without any deliberate intention, he 
did not at times inflict a subtle Nemesis upon those 
who had disappointed liim. I seem to recall a cer- 
tain wistfulness in old Marshall's tone when he 
spoke of Ford afterwards. . . . Did the fact that 
his testimonial had not been asked for rankle 
quietly in his mind? I am almost disposed to 
hope so. 

The lack of a reference did not deter Ford from 
applying for a senior mastership in another 
school, or prevent his getting it. Apparently his 
new head-master liked his letter of application, in- 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 73 

terviewed him and approved of his ideas on edu- 
cation, and asked no further question. I know 
little of his life here except that he was happy, 
very much more free to teach as he chose, and 
considerably better off. A small boy of eleven or 
twelve at the time, I wrote him one or two round- 
hand letters, and lost his answers, of which I can 
only recall that they were friendly, whimsical, 
and very refreshing to read in an ink-stained, 
dusty-smelling classroom. 

The habit of travel which Ford had acquired 
from his life with his father could now be indulged 
to some extent during school holidays. The holi- 
days during his year at Marshall's had to be 
spent, for economic reasons, with his military 
uncle, whom Ford regarded with amused, respect- 
ful gratitude, and who regarded Ford with affec- 
tionate despair. Ford now spent little time with 
the old colonel, to their mutual relief, but went 
instead on inexpensive trips to Bruges and Nor- 
mandy. But these were scarcely satisfying after 
his wider- ranging experiences with his father; 
also they were never, in practice, inexpensive 
enough, and had to be atoned for by severe pinch- 
ing. It happened that I needed coaching, one 
Easter holidays in my fourteenth year, for a pub- 
lic school scholarship, and the question of a tutor 
was in the air. I pleaded that Ford might be 
approached, and successfully. Ford, to whom the 
invitation happened to be highly opportune finan- 
cially (a Christmas in Heidelberg had reduced him 
to two suits, one very shiny), replied that he was 



74 W. E. FORD 

quite unqualified for the task, being neither a pub- 
lic school man nor a practised coach, and could of- 
fer nothing more convincing than his own opinion 
that he could teach me anything that was needed. 
I remember the anxiety with which I watched the 
letter, in Ford's small, neatly spaced handwriting, 
undergo its breakfast-table scrutiny. To my joy 
the verdict was favourable. 

Ford came ; and on the same day the appearance 
of a minor infectious complaint made it advisable 
that I should go away from home — to be quaran- 
tined might mean that I could not go up for ex- 
amination. It happened that I could not con- 
veniently be sent away with him to any relative 
or friend. Ford had always a certain quiet, un- 
offending assurance in idealing with a contre- 
temps of this sort; it was a small matter, but I 
do not believe many men would have put forward 
to strangers the suggestion which he offered — that 
he and I should go upon a walking tour, with 
teaching on and by the way. Nor would every 
man have made the suggestion seem the most nat- 
ural thing in the world. At all events we set out, 
and walked and talked for three weeks in the 
Lake District. I find it hard to say what it was, 
exactly, that he taught me during this time. He 
spoke strictly, while we tramped, or sat in the 
stuffy sitting-rooms of North country inns, about 
Latin and Greek grammar, quadratic equations, 
Angevin kings or French genders ; but I think the 
chief thing that I learned was a certain sense of 
command over subjects that were in themselves 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 75 

comparatively silly and meaningless — petty con- 
cerns, in the handling of which Ford seemed able 
to communicate to me a kind of authoritativeness. 
I know that when the ordeal came I went through 
it without a tremor, and found myself writing my 
papers like a tradesman parcelling up goods from 
a well-arranged stock; and the arrangement had 
been Ford's doing. I won that scholarship in 
virtue of an attitude of mind. Ford's principle as 
an examination coach, I afterwards learned, was 
a cynical one; he held that examinations are of 
little use as tests of general ability — that they 
test, in fact, nothing much but the ability to pass 
examinations, an isolated faculty of no very high 
value or significance. He did not coach by giving 
dodges or tips, but by getting the available con- 
tents of a pupil's mind into a particular artificial 
order and arrangement, suitable not for genuine 
thought, but for the easy handling and sorting out 
of the pellets of fact for which examiners chiefly 
make requisition. A wholesome contempt for the 
entire business was, perhaps, not the least valu- 
able part of the equipment that he supplied. 

This, Ford's first experiment in coaching, 
chanced to be something of a turning-point in his 
manner of life, quite apart from teaching. Our 
walking tour gave him the idea that it is worth 
while to travel at home as well as abroad; and 
it was not long before he had set himself to 
the discovery of England. He loved places as 
places, but his insatiable passion, which became 
an important influence in his later life, was for 



76 W. E. FORD 

understanding the minds of different types of 
men. He studied men as though he were giving 
himself the training that a statesman ought to 
undergo. He came to know the common English- 
man, the worker, in most of his typical varieties, 
so well that he could not talk about the working 
classes for five minutes to any ordinary member 
of the upper or professional class without convinc- 
ing him that he. Ford, was talking nonsense, in 
plain contradiction of the facts that a man can 
read in his newspaper any day of the week. It 
was not that he suggested any social theory which 
ran against his interlocutor's politics; in the ordi- 
nary modern sense of the word ** polities'' Ford 
had none ; but his knowledge bridged a gap which 
few genteel people can even imagine as bridged 
without real mental discomfort. Consequently he 
seldom let himself be drawn into talk with the 
well-to-do about *^the masses." His understand- 
ing of them remained a personal hobby that he 
could share with few. 



CHAPTER V 

Two explanations are due to the reader before I 
write of the next period in Ford's life. The first 
concerns my source of information with regard 
to a peculiarly intimate phase of his experience. 
I have given myself the task of setting down, as 
simply as possible, everything without exception 
that seems really typical of Ford as I knew him. 
I do not think that an honest biography can be 
written otherwise. But in reading a biography 
I have often been conscious of a scruple, when 
the book came within touch of the ultimate pene- 
tralia of the subject — a sense that the biographer 
must have overstepped some boundary, not of 
reticence so much as of confidence, in saying or 
hinting so much ; and with this sense there comes 
a reluctance to read further without some explicit 
or implicit assurance that one's peering is, as it 
were, authorised, and that one is not an accessory 
after the fact, conniving for curiosity's sake in 
the writer's immodest tweaking aside of curtains. 
The difficulty is obvious when one becomes the 
writer; it would be a clumsy interruption to the 
flow of the story to be always giving chapter and 
verse in proof of loyalty to a friend's confidence; 
but the fact remains of the reader's potential dis- 
comfort when the subject of a biography seems to 

77 



78 W. E. FORD 

be laid out upon the dissecting-table. To avoid 
a series of self-defensive paragraphs throughout 
this chapter, I propose to state, once and for all, 
my reasons for believing that Ford would have 
passed an even closer description of his experience 
as a lover than I can base upon the things that he 
told me. 

As we talked, and as he dropped out, one by 
one, detail after detail of his own story, he con- 
tinually recurred to a fundamental desire that 
others might only know, through clear statement, 
what he himself had learned with such slow diffi- 
culty through an ignorant process of trial and 
error. ^ ' I wish I were a novelist, ' ' he would say, 
and would go on to speak of the manner in which 
he would construct a novel upon the basis of his 
past experience — a novel that should be a plea for 
frankness, for straight dealing in that market of 
the emotions to which a man and a woman recipro- 
cally commit themselves, on approval, when once 
they have tacitly admitted that love may be the 
outcome of nearer acquaintance. 

Also, he had no pleasure in reticence for its 
own sake, often maintaining that human relation- 
ships would develop along very much happier lines 
if only we could all be persuaded to keep no cards 
up our sleeves. 

My second difficulty, it will be guessed, is in 
writing about the object of Ford's predilection. 
It does not matter that recognition, among a cer- 
tain smallish circle of friends and acquaintances, 
is inevitable, for there is no reason why it should 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 79 

be in any degree discomforting unless to the mind 
that makes reticence a fetish. (And this type of 
mind, I must confess, I think it a plain duty as 
well as a delight to shock.) Outside this circle, 
my alteration of the name will sufficiently cover 
the tracks. 

It was through his contact with working men 
that Ford first became really conscious of woman 
as a natural force. Hitherto he had taken women 
for granted, and indeed had seen but little of 
them. Having grown up motherless and sister- 
less, without even an aunt to stand for femininity 
among his youthful conceptions, it was perhaps 
natural that he should have almost ignored the 
phenomenon for so long. If he had been made of 
more quickly inflammable material in the amatory 
sense, he might well have stumbled into initiation, 
in his ignorance, upon the lowest of planes; he 
always declared that here fortune must have been 
on his side. It was curious that his first con- 
fused inkling of vital aspects with regard to one 
half of humanity should have come through his 
interest in the cruder strata of the other half — 
through the blunt talk of men in a wharf side inn 
or a booth at an agricultural fair. 

He described such talk as affecting him, whether 
it was characterised by a beery jocularity or by 
a rough semi-articulate earnestness, with an odd 
sense of paradox. Woman was, alternatively, a 
hoarse joke, a terror, a prop and stay, a whirl- 
wind of words, a Silence. Within it all, the strong 
synthetic faculty in Ford's mind seemed to dis- 



80 W. E. FORD 

cern, subconsciously at first, a picture of a 
woman's world, seen darkly in the very smoky 
glass from which the men transmitted these con- 
tradictory reflections. His general impression was 
that women stood for something that he had not 
yet begun to realise, something vaguely funda- 
mental that was treated by crude masculinity with 
a kind of ribald respect. There must be, he began 
to infer, a whole hemisphere, hidden from him 
hitherto like the other side of the moon, of 
women's interests, women's share in the uphold- 
ing of society — woman's outlook. Upper middle- 
class life, so far as he had seen it in being and as 
a whole, had successfully concealed from him that 
any such complex could co-exist with the world 
of masculine thought and organisation. He had 
thought of woman, before, as a remote and a com- 
fortably undefined variant of man: an adjunct, 
biologically necessary, and economically valuable 
in the maintenance of domestic functions, to be 
classed as such without further intellectual bother. 
He now began to envisage the feminine hemi- 
sphere as a dimly lit but an essential reality; 
and thence he gradually came to the realisation 
that the masculine and the feminine outlook had 
no dividing boundary but were coterminous, dif- 
ferent indeed but not separate — intricately, in- 
dissolubly interrelated. 

Thus his interest in man, abstract and then con- 
crete, led him inevitably to an interest in woman ; 
abstract at first, and then . . . concrete. In a 
sense it is true that be brought to first love the 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 81 

spirit of a detached inquirer ; but not in the sense 
in which detachment means bloodlessness, or mor- 
bid introspection, or over-analysis. He had the 
true instinct to empty himself of experience in 
order to know experience ; he emerged into the sun- 
bathed world of first love as a chicken comes out of 
its shell. But his intellect was very much part of 
the chicken. 

Mary Worthington (as I shall call her) was a 
girl to whom slumming was a new hobby in a 
world that consisted very largely of the raw mate- 
rial for new hobbies. Tall, slight, fair, and ex- 
pensive-looking, she came as Lady Bountiful to 
a home in Bermondsey where Ford, pipe in mouth, 
was lending the woman of the house a hand with 
the mangle, and discut/sing with her the husband's 
chance of finding the job that he had gone out to 
look for. The husband was a friend whom he 
had picked up the day before, a ne'er-do-weel who, 
having broken his wife 's arm in the course of the 
drunken fit that had brought about his most re- 
cent dismissal, would on this day have been con- 
tritely helping with the wreck's washing if Ford 
had not hounded him out in quest of work alid 
taken his place at the wheel. Ford was explained 
to Mary Worthington as *^a young friend of me 
'usband's,'' and had to explain himself further, 
on interrogation, as being not out of work too, but 
on a holiday. His tone and manner must have 
belied the appearance and costume that he affected 
for these occasions, for it followed, the mangling 



82 W. E. FORD 

being finished, that Miss Worthington quite wel- 
comed Ford's tentative readiness to accompany 
her down the street. 

They began, naturally, to talk of working-class 
problems, and Mary, a novice in such matters, 
questioned and listened eagerly as Ford produced 
his views. Always keen to talk dowTi to the roots 
of a subject in the company of any one with whom 
he felt sympathetic, he must have been at his 
best in this conversation. Mary, chiefly impressed 
at first by his lucidity of statement, quickly caught 
the glow of his enthusiasm, and give light for light 
by enveloping him in that softly luminous atmo- 
sphere of appreciation in which thought unfolds 
and blossoms into language unafraid. He was an 
engaging mystery to her — some young socialist 
poet, she thought him, an extreme product of that 
working-class education of which she had vaguely 
heard at home. She had not got past the sugges- 
tion of the artisan about his clothes, and the sug- 
gestion gave the secure sense of a gulf across 
which romantic interest could play quite uncom- 
mitted. Ford, engrossed in his thesis, was more 
or less conscious of a new vibration, a subtly elec- 
trical thrill. He was of the type that enters into 
personal relations through fundamentals rather 
than by way of small surface steps toward inti- 
macy ; and there was something novel in the qual- 
ity of his listener's attention, a certain delicate 
allurement that beckoned on his words, an un- 
spoken assurance that nothing need lie too near 
his heart for speech. 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 83 

A crucial moment came when they discovered 
that they had walked nearly to Knightsbridge, 
and that the Worthingtons ' house was close at 
hand. There was a pause at a corner, a pretext of 
a few final questions, a spinning out of the replies, 
while each w^as consolidating the rapidly formed 
decision that this must not be the end. . . . 

They agreed, both of them half shamefacedly, 
upon an hour the following day when both would 
be likely to revisit the lady of the mangle. It 
was important, as they very rightly reassured 
one another, to know as soon as possible whether 
the husband had or had not managed to find work 
— and, if he had not, to collaborate at once in put- 
ting to the test their value as whole-hearted vo- 
taries of the poor and the dishonoured. 

The man had not found work; he was a speci- 
men too deeply sunken to find anything, unless 
by chance, without the aid of others, his superiors 
either in virtue of vitality or of social handicap 
in the race of life. His case, and that of his wife 
and children, made a very pretty problem for 
Ford and Mary Worthington to solve, and on the 
whole they solved it cleanly. But its solution was 
a long business — any one who has touched social 
problems in the concrete, even with the most ama- 
teurish hand, will know how long — and in the pro- 
cess they raised a very different problem for 
themselves, an enigma that was to prove too hard 
for final solution of any kind. 

Ford had fallen in love, of course, with Mary 
Worthington, if we are to consider it crudely ; but 



84 W. E. FORD 

the phrase ^ ' to fall in love ' ' admits of many vary- 
ing interpretations, and I think, if I am to state 
my own view of his condition with a bluntness 
equal to that of the conventional admission, that 
there was a sense in which he was never in lov0 
with her at all, nor she with him. He suffered 
agonies ; but they were not agonies of desire, and 
they led to no crucial determination. On the other 
hand, he undoubtedly found Mary indispensable, 
as she found him, for the sake of some unique cur- 
rent that could flow only through their associa- 
tion. Ford, his status now confessed — ^no ro- 
mantic, self-educated artisan, but, even worse, 
perhaps, to the moneyed mind, a mere upper-mid- 
dle-class straggler — became an occasional, a very 
occasional caller who disguised the shabbiness of 
his best suit in the darker corners of the preten- 
tious Worthington drawing-room. The two met 
far oftener — the Worthingtons would have been 
deeply scandalised if they had known — as coad- 
jutors in promoting the welfare of the down- 
trodden. (No doubt they met for the sake of 
meeting; but it should be recorded that several 
other ** cases'' are still voluble in their appreci- 
ation of the sympathy so uncommonly practical, 
so effectively helpful, that gave them a fresh and 
an actually progressive start in life.) 

Mary Worthington had played with flirtation 
m her time, and had become bored with it. She 
had never encountered a deep personal emotion 
before, and she played with it, in herself, as a 
cat plays with a mouse — or as a mouse might sur- 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 85 

render itself to a game of hide-and-seek with a 
cat. With Ford's emotions as distinct from her 
own she did not play, but rather commiserated 
them and him. At this time they quite wished 
that they could marry, but the thing was clearly 
preposterous. Sir Joshua Worthington had tens 
of thousands a year, and no intention of sharing 
them in any proportion with needy aspirants to 
his daughter's hand. Ford had, by now, £200 or 
£250. Mary had expensive tastes . . . and none 
was to prove more expensive, as a matter of spir- 
itual economics, than her taste for Ford. She 
could neither accept him wholly nor give him up. 
They hung fire interminably. 

If Ford had been able to play the impetuous 
suitor whole-heartedly, things might have been 
different. But he held a curious theory — his be- 
lief in it was lifelong, and I have an idea, though 
he never told me so, that it originated with Paul 
Ford — that no such thing as a one-sided love 
could exist, and that the ultimate test for the re- 
ality and permanence of a passion lies in the per- 
fection of its mutuality. An endless number of 
unhappy marriages, he would maintain, come of 
engagements that either the man or the woman 
has forced on, relying on a single, individual 
flood-tide of the emotions to float a vessel, in 
which two must live, over all the shallows of life. 
It was not that one loved more and the other less, 
and that the less was bound to stultify the more ; 
the often-accepted doctrine would then be equally 
tenable that the less-lovins: could ^4earn to love" 



86 W. E. FORD 

the more-loving — that the greater passion would 
raise the lesser to its own level. By Ford's the- 
ory there was no greater passion, but only a pas- 
sion that was temporarily more vehement ; greater 
in momentary pressure, but less in ultimate vol- 
ume. Ford was always, if he was anything, an 
advocate of the liberation rather than the repres- 
sion of natural impulse, but when sex came into 
question he carried this principle into a further 
region than that of the plain issue between self- 
expression and self- restriction. ^'The sex-motif,'' 
he once wrote to me, "was essential to the or- 
chestration of life millions of years, probably, be- 
fore man appeared upon the earth. It is so fun- 
damental that we, who in a sophisticated civili- 
sation have lost control of fundamentals, have yet 
to take jolly good care that it doesn't run away 
with us unawares. We mustn't shove it under^ — 
things that are shoved under go rotten, and fes- 
ter below the surface—but we have got to see that 
when it comes up it sfian't come up with a rush 
that sweeps us (and others besides us) off our 
civilised feet." 

There can be no doubt that Ford deliberately 
refused to force the pace with Mary Worthing- 
ton. His own desire was strong at times — and 
there was also the convention by which only the 
man may give even the slightest explicit intima- 
tion that desire exists. But he refrained, not 
only because he knew that her emotion was 
slighter or more inhibited than his own, but also 
because he was assured that no passionate im- 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 87 

pulse of his own was justified or justifiable un- 
less it evoked, spontaneously, without any letting 
loose of flood-gates on his part, an equal prelim- 
inary response on hers. 

Desire, besides, was not for either of them the 
beginning and the end of the matter. They de- 
siderated a complete union of mind and outlook — 
not a sameness but a correlation, a perfection of 
give-and-take. And there were subjects on which 
give-and-take was distressingly imperfect. 

In this respect they had met, at first, under very 
favourable auspices. Mary had been brought up 
in a family atmosphere of gold-cased Toryism, 
and had encountered Ford over a question of the 
practical application of social theory — a trouble- 
some region of thought from which the gold-cas- 
ing had efficiently shielded her hitherto. As re- 
gards Bermondsey her mind had been virgin 
ground; she had not learned the comfortable Cal- 
vinism that is convinced of the pre-ordained un- 
der-doggishness of the under-dog, or she would 
not have gone a-slumming in so ingenuous a hope 
of ameliorating its lot. Consequently Ford's the- 
ory, combined with the visible and unqualified suc- 
cess of Ford's practice, had appealed to her as 
common sense idealism of quite unquestionable 
excellence, and she became the convert-at-sight 
of a social doctrine at which gilded Tories, Man- 
chester Liberals, and Marxian Socialists would 
have turned up their noses with a rare unanimity. 
Ford's later dictum, ''a man is worth what he 
wills," was the real root of the lesson that Mary 



88 W. E. FORD 

so readily learned from him; and no system of 
government or of social organisation has yet been 
put forward that adequately answers the demands 
of such a principle. But Mary took the notion in 
her stride, quite naturally, on account of its ob- 
vious Tightness, oblivious of the fact that it up- 
set the foundations of her upbringing. 

None the less, those foundations were upset; 
and when other points arose, upon which Ford's 
convictions and her carefully ingrained preju- 
dices were at variance, she had a feeling that he 
had almost stolen a march upon her by establish- 
ing in her mind his own sense that human values 
were absolute, not relative. They disagreed la- 
mentably about the rights and wrongs of the Boer 
War, and she felt, throughout the controversy 
upon which that minor tragedy led them reluc- 
tantly to engage, that he had rather unfairly 
made out his case for the Boers in advance, when 
he had made it plain to her too willing compre- 
hension that the British worker was both misun- 
derstood and exploited, and then reviled and op- 
pressed if he ever resented the misunderstanding 
or rebelled against the exploitation. Her case 
against the Boers rested upon no such theoretic 
grounds. They were rebels and traitors— -Sir 
Joshua, her father, had carried repetition on this 
point to the level of hypnotic conviction. They 
were Enemies of Our Empire. They were dirty 
brutes who didn't wash. (Ford unwisely ven- 
tured the witticism that their real opponents were 
mining prospectuses that wouldn't wash either — 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 89 

one says such things in moments of heat.) The 
natural result of such a discussion was mere dead- 
lock. Their mutuality, on this question, became 
a mutuality of pained surprise, with the phrase, 
'^Oh, why can't you understand ...?'' as its 
dominant motive. ( No one, of course, was dream- 
ing, then, of an ultimate reconciliation between 
Boer and Briton.) 

The Boer War was typical of their subjects of 
disagreement. Like most people, Mary was ready 
to rejoice in the sweeping tide of patriotic en- 
thusiasm that surged over England at the time, 
and instinctively hostile to the appearance of any 
critical breakwater. When Ford spoke, in terms 
that suggested the diagnosis of a disease, of the 
muddy waves of slum wastrels that rolled rioting 
over London when news came of some barely 
averted fiasco at the front, she was saddened and 
bewildered. It seemed to her literally disgrace- 
ful, it seemed to manifest some fatal kink in 
Ford's character that he could fail to be at one 
with the general sentiment. There were occa- 
sions, she felt — and there are many people who 
feel as she did — when no one has a right to hold 
an individual opinion. 

There were also generic subjects to which per- 
sonal, distinctive views seemed to her to be mis- 
applied. The foremost of these, as may easily 
be guessed, was religion. Ford was beginning at 
this time an attempt to achieve clarity of mind as 
regards the meaning and the usefulness of church 
doctrine. Characteristically, he saw the conflict 



90 W. E. FORD 

between a spiritual and a material interpretation 
of life as a mere waste of time ; he wanted to ar- 
rive at a unity — to see how the material expresses 
the spiritual, and how the spiritual justifies the 
material. Mary had learned to keep the two as- 
pects in watertight compartments, and by ac- 
quired instinct she was uneasily mistrustful of 
any tampering with the partition. Her church- 
loyalty demanded that the spiritual should dis- 
claim all need of support from the material, 
should regard any association, indeed, in the light 
of a contamination; he, hot upon the track of his 
thesis, would fail to notice her distress as he main- 
tained not only that materialism was contaminat- 
ing only in so far as it became divorced from its' 
correlative and corrective, the spiritual outlook 
(on this point alone they might have found a 
basis of agreement), but also, and the more in- 
sistently for her opposition, that the spiritual 
outlook could have neither vitality nor breadth 
till it had condescended to tussle with the grossest 
and grimiest facts of man's material existence. 
In Ford's view, no comfort of the soul was worth 
more than the cushioned comfort of a sofa until 
the nearest slum had been accounted for; just as 
no explanation of bodily things was worth look- 
ing at that did not take into account their sym- 
bolic, even their sacramental, aspect as crude and 
imperfect manifestations of something spiritual. 
From religion, and from sacramentalism — the 
main stumbling-block of all religious discussion — 
they fell very naturally into an interminable ar- 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 91 

gument about marriage. It is difficult to realise 
how this couple, in many respects so ill-assorted, 
found it so easy, as to them it appears to have 
been, to talk freely and openly about marriage 
and about the awkward problems of sex that any 
frank discussion of marriage inevitably drags 
into court. I can only explain that Ford was, 
upon this subject, a rather exceptional being. 
He could talk to boys about sex in a way that 
made the, whole business seem as simple and 
straightforward as walking across a road; and I 
can imagine that he could have talked about sex 
to a girl in much the same irresistibly ingenuous 
tone. And there is also the fact that on this point 
he and Mary met in a common ingenuousness — 
she had been shielded from sex as from slumdom, 
and brought to the one as fresh and natural a mind 
as to the other. At all events they contrived to' 
agree about sex — very much in the abstract, of 
course — far more distinctly than the really nice- 
minded would think allowable, while maintaining 
an unalterable antagonism upon the question of 
marriage. 

(It must be explained that the mere word 
^^ marriage" had no terrors for them personally. 
The possibility of their getting married was by 
this time quite a commonplace between them, and 
if once their various disagreements had been com- 
pletely and satisfactorily resolved, they would 
have sought out their officiating parson and would 
have had the knot tied without even a momentary 
qualm.) 



92 W. E. FORD 

Naturally, it was their puzzled contemplation 
of the married lives of the poor that first set them 
talking about marriage in general. The attitude 
of their Bermondsey friend, the lady of the man- 
gle, towards her dreadful husband — an attitude 
of disillusion indeed, but stoic rather than cyni- 
cal — became a nucleus for one part of their dis- 
cussion. There must be something about mar- 
riage, they decided — about the definite burning 
of boats that it involved, all the more definite for 
the poor, who have no subconscious thought of di- 
vorce as a possible way of retreat in the last ex- 
tremity — something of extraordinary efficacy in 
leading people to make the best of one another, 
cutting underneath the irritations and petulan- 
cies that so often bring a friendship or an unfet- 
tered union to an end. Their disagreement was 
about the nature of this something. Mary was 
sure that it was the element of compulsion that 
settled the matter. Any two people, she would 
say, can keep together up to a certain point; be- 
yond this point, whether they reach it sooner or 
later, their interests, their ways or their views of 
life, have to clash. Here the sheer imperative of 
the marriage contract says its say; and the im- 
petus of its absolute declaration, ^^You must go 
on with it,'' tides the disputants over these in- 
evitable shoals into the quieter and deeper waters 
of mutual acceptance and toleration. The word 
tolera,tion was to Ford, in such a connection, like 
a red rag to a bull. He would have none of it. 
Tolerance was a fine thing between enemies, an 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 93 

admirable half-way house for those who, tempted 
to hatred, preferred the magnanimous alternative 
of giving credit for sincerity to opponents with 
whom they confessed to a misunderstanding. But 
it was not the attitude for people who loved, or 
professed to love. Marriage, for these, was not 
to be a compelling tie for the reluctant, but a 
splendid declaration of mutual liberty for the 
willing — a mutual declaration of independence in 
interdependence that should commit a man and a 
woman, not to acquiescence in an outside authority 
that strapped them, as it were, together, but to 
their realised and expressed confidence in an in- 
ner authority, common to them both, that could be 
relied upon to dissolve their inevitable differences 
of idea into a common unity of purpose. 

Ford in fact believed, as Mary complained, that 
marriage, the ceremony and the contract, *^ didn't 
really do anything'' in the sense of forcibly fixing 
a spiritual relationship in a state of permanence, 
or of supplying a compelling spiritual motive 
from without for the tiding-over of a period of 
stress. He held that its influence from without 
was solely on the side of respectability and cor- 
rectitude — ^powerful, useful, but not spiritual 
forces. Its spiritual significance lay wholly in 
the degree to which it was the symbol and the 
expression of an inner feeling, a nucleus of ex- 
pressed purpose upon which thought could focus 
and around which all the vague sentiments, emo- 
tions, and aspirations that come and pass in a 



94 W. E. FORD 

more fleeting relationship might cluster and co- 
ordinate. 

This notion of a mental nucleus had a great deal 
to do with Ford^s view of sex and of physical 
passion. ^'It is fatal/' he wrote to me on another 
occasion, *^to let one's thought dwell upon these 
physical urgencies ; the more you are an educated, 
civilised creature, the more fatal it is — a devel- 
oped imagination brings up such terrific reinforce- 
ments ! And it is just as fatal to determine, in a 
merely negative spirit, not to think about them: 
blank inhibition (if — if it succeeds) only drives 
the thing underground. The equally difficult ef- 
fort of will implied in ^thinking about something 
else' is at least harmless (again, if it succeeds) ; 
but it merely shelves the difficulty from one time 
to the next, and I am not sure that it doesn't end 
by overcrowding the shelf to toppling-point. My 
own remedy is, as usual, co-ordination. Never let 
yourself look at the business as if it were an iso- 
lated phenomenon. Think about 'something else' 
— think about everything else — but think about 
other tilings as they are affected by the sex diffi- 
culty. That's the way to get that confounded 
Voice of Nature into a proper frame of mind 
about its relative importance and unimportance. 
Make it realise that it was always meant to be the 
servant, never the autocrat of Life. ..." 

And I have gathered that Ford talked to Mary 
Worthington, not in so frank a strain but to the 
same more generalised effect, about that perpet- 
ual bother of sex which so afflicts the unacknowl- 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 95 

edged underlives of civilised people. Their dis- 
cussion of marriage, first from tlie spiritual, then 
from the social, point of view, had to come down 
— such was their mutual sincerity — to the material 
bedrock of physical fact. But Ford, while insist- 
ing through all delicacy of treatment upon the 
sheer realities, kept clear his main principle of 
co-ordination. And, in the interests of co-ordina- 
tion, and of his principle that sex must somehow 
be brought into proportion with the other demands 
of Nature and of civilisation, he was strong in 
his insistence that the mental nucleus provided by 
the human convention of marriage was incalcula- 
bly effective in making passion a relative, not an 
absolute factor in the life of man. The marriage- 
ideal makes it an essential that people should take 
other things equally into account. It brings 
everything in — necessary adaptabilities in mat- 
ters of temper — the financial element — questions 
of habit and idiosyncrasy — all these matters, each 
with its place and purpose, come in to qualify the 
single, sheer animal obsession which sex can only 
too easily become if it is regarded for itself alone. 
I remember that Ford said once, in conversation, 
^ ' Sex has become top-heavy in civilised life. Mar- 
riage is the only efficient ballast that has been dis- 
covered so far.'* 

Their own friendship, for all the fundamental 
disagreements by which it was fretted, certainly 
had much the quality of a well-nucleated mar- 
riage of minds. Their quite extraordinary free- 
doms of discussion — freedoms, too, whose setting 



96 W. E. FORD 

was the vibrant atmosphere of their strong mu- 
tual attraction — can have been possible only in 
virtue of that ^^co-ordination'' of which Ford 
spoke. It became, I know, so settled a habit of 
thought between them that they could talk of one 
thing in terms of another, without any uttered 
arrangement or definition of symbols, not vaguely 
but with the simplest lucidity and directness. And 
it was in a glow of happiness that they came to- 
gether in such talk, rejoicing in the electrical leap 
of feeling and understanding that thrilled every 
interchange. Their happiness, indeed, must have 
been singularly perfect and poetic at times. But 
there was another side to the picture. Besides 
their frank joy in ranging the wide expanse of 
thought and feeling that was theirs in common, 
there was the ever-recurrent moment of inevitable 
trespass into the region of their ineluctable dif- 
ferences. And the differences, too, had their co- 
ordination, their sensitive nucleus — but sensitive 
for pain, not for joy. The keen edge of mutual 
insight had to cut both ways. The friendship was 
bi-nuclear, and one of the nuclei — hurt. Nothing 
could be laughed away as a trivial disagreement, 
not worth troubling about; at the dropping of a 
pebble the whole flock of their differences rose, 
darkening the sun. 

In attempting to give the true story of Ford's 
experience, with the hope of eliciting some hint 
of its influence upon his life and his outlook, I 
ought not to shirk the analysis of certain periods 
of black agony through which he passed. I feel 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 97 

that their recognition is vital to the full under- 
standing of the man. But my pen hesitates as 
though it were a scalpel held in an inexpert hand 
above sentient flesh. No one can know the degree 
of suffering that underlay that difficult venture 
along an untrodden path. The heights of spirit- 
ual intimacy, of luminous delight beyond words, 
had a splendour of which Ford's broken gleams 
of reminiscence have given me an ever-memorable 
glimpse ; but he hid the depths of frustration, the 
abyss of love eager and denied, the tragedy of 
those who can lose their hearts but cannot lose 
their heads. Here I must respect his so unusual 
secretiveness. The tragedy can be expressed very 
fully and completely in fewer words than it 
would take to outline, in detail, its lowest tide- 
mark. Ford and Mary Worthington lost love 
because they had indulged in the dream of a re- 
lation beyond the compass of present humanity 
— something too near the love of angels to be ap- 
proached without a lamentable singeing of mortal 
wings. But Ford was not to know this for the 
truth until several long years had passed. 

My clearest mental picture of the pair at this 
time has for background a country lane that winds 
through cropped hazel-groves gleaming freshly 
with the sweet, virginal colouring of spring flow- 
ers — a scene that Ford revisited with me many 
years later, ^ ' scanning its beauties with an absent 
gaze'' that told of a vivid train of reawakened 
memories. He gave me his memories, in an odd, 
dreamy way, as though he were remembering 



98 W. E. FORD 

aloud, that evening as we smoked and watched the 
fading afterglow of sunset after supper at a vil- 
lage inn. It was on this occasion that he spoke 
most feelingly of his desire that it were possible, 
somehow, so to set out the story of his bygone 
experience that a few others might know and un- 
derstand. A sense of beauties past and foregone 
— inevitably foregone, because they had been of 
their nature uncapturable — had hold of him that 
evening; and he longed that one or two besides 
himself might realise not the beauty alone, the 
perilous beauty of such a first love as his, but 
also the infinite trouble, the unmanageable com- 
plex of mere mortal incertitude and worry that 
comes of a love-ideal left too much in the air, a 
love-story in which hero and heroine alike are at 
the mercy of the clouds and winds that are ap- 
pointed to make sport of those who choose to 
abandon their footing upon solid earth. ^ 

It was a romantically-minded elder married sis- 
ter of Mary's, aided and abetted by a husband 
with literary interests and unconventional views 
of propriety (I can touch upon their unashamed 
complicity, now that Sir Joshua Worthington has 
gone whither this book cannot follow him, with- 
out bringing opprobrium upon their heads — and 
they must forgive me this summary specification 
of their amiable selves), who provided opportu- 
nity for the long walks and discussions in a coun- 
tryside lit by spring. Mary came down from Lon- 

* This reference of Ford 's, which I have endeavored to para- 
phrase, was to Goethe 's poem Grenzen der MenschJieit. 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 99 

don and stayed with them, and Ford had rooms 
near by, and thence the two carried out what 
might be described as a series of small celibate 
elopements, walking expeditions of a day, two 
days, three or four days. The sister, trusting 
Ford's unmistakable balance and Mary's ''nice- 
ness," or perhaps with an instinctive judgment 
for the fact that they were too much set upon a 
fastidious perfection to snatch at the improvident 
moment, feared no sudden sensuous culmination, 
though she longed sympathetically for the psycho- 
logical culmination that should decide them de- 
liberately to marry in despite of obstacles. Her 
husband encouraged her rather to welcome than 
to dread the slight risk of a compromising scan- 
dal; he was frankly impatient for developments, 
and told Ford in the course of a semi-avuncular 
talk that any occurrence capable of shaking them 
up and inducing them to get a move on would 
meet with his highest approval. He only put into 
direct and matter-of-fact language the first ele- 
ments of an idea that was by now very strongly 
present in their own minds. 

They were distressed, and perhaps a little 
wearied in spirit over the failure hitherto of their 
long-continued etfort to come to terms; and they 
rejoiced at the developing prospect that now un- 
folded itself before them of a freedom, an elbow- 
room in time hitherto unattainable, which might 
give them a real chance of explaining themselves 
to one another, of achieving at last the long-de- 
siderated fusion of their poignant difficulties. 



100 W. E. FORD 

Long days in the clear, crystalline open air of 
spring; long, open talks, and long, open silences 
under the deepening sky that seemed to enlarge 
its vault inimitably for the reception of cosmic 
confidences ; long twilights, when they would meet 
to watch the brightening of stars until the hour 
arrived for them to part again and return for the 
night to their discreetly separate lodgings; it all 
seemed to promise an opportunity, a liberation 
that might lead to anything and everything. The 
opportunity was in truth magnificent; but they 
miscalculated the force that had held and was 
bound to hold them apart. Nature, even in spring, 
could not heal the cleft between two minds that 
thought oppositely about the purposes of life. 

None the less they strove unknowingly for a 
complete reconciliation. The tide of spring's im- 
pulse was strong in them, and ever and again they 
would struggle, as they tramped and talked, for 
the consummation of thought and feeling that 
should make everything clear in a strife so keen 
as to be literally exhausting. But each time their 
castle, half built in the air, would collapse; their 
mental individualities would fall back from one 
another, retracted, resentful, hostile, while their 
talk took refuge in an atmosphere of half-hu- 
morous mutual condolence. 

Their problem changed its footing with the ad- 
mission of failure that worked its way at last into 
the place of command. Before, the question had 
been whether they could not go the whole way to- 
gether, from a unique friendship to as unique a 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 101 

passion; now they had their answer, for the time 
at least, and were faced by a new uncertainty. 
There they were ; their relation was none the less 
in being for its failure of becoming ; and its being, 
its apparent state of permanent suspension, re- 
fused to be translated into a matter for quiet ac- 
ceptance. It was a perpetual ache. They decided 
to part for a time, to ''break off the non-engage- 
ment, ' ^ as Ford put it, and go their separate ways 
in search, perhaps of enlightenment, at any rate 
of the peace of mind that they could never achieve 
together. 

My real intimacy with Ford began shortly after 
this decision had been ratified. I had just left 
school, and was to travel for six months before 
going to Oxford; Ford had already determined 
to leave Buckley's, and willingly accepted the post 
of my cicerone^ offered at so opportune a mo- 
ment. 

I knew nothing of Mary Worthington at this 
time, nor did I know, what I was later to learn, 
that Ford, at thirty-two, had come to a point in 
life at which he was heavily assailed by a sense 
of failure and of personal meaningiessness. He 
had done nothing, he felt, achieved nothing; his 
personality was in vacuo. He had moods of hor- 
rible depression when he saw himself as a hollow 
and purposeless thing in a world of mocking un- 
realities. Yet at this very time he stood to me 
for aU that was strong and hopeful and vital in 
thought. If I could have read his inner question- 
ings then, I should have been as much amazed 



102 W. E. FORD 

as though I had seen him turn into some one else 
before my eyes. It must have been that as he 
fought out his own battle against pessimism, he 
imparted to me the gains of every local success 
and, for the main issue, radiated the courage that 
was determined to fight its way out of darkness, 
not the tense anxiety and disquiet which made 
that courage necessary. 



CHAPTER VI 

Our plan was to go to Teneriffe for January and 
February of 1903, perhaps visiting one or two 
other of the Canaries in the course of our stay; 
then to get some kind of a boat to take us to Cape 
Juby on the West African mainland, and to work 
our way in leisurely style around and eastwards 
along North Africa ; and then, crossing the Medit- 
erranean to Sicily, to travel northwards through 
Italy as gradually as the rise of the season's tem- 
perature might allow, finally crossing the Maloja 
Pass into the Engadine, to try our hands at climb- 
ing (it is his hands that the novice uses), and to 
enjoy that climax of the Alpine flowers that comes 
just before midsummer. It was a pretty scheme, 
but circumstance and our own choice were to find 
us an even better one. 

We spent a fortnight in TenerifPe, of which the 
first ten days devoted themselves, belatedly, we 
were told, to showing us what sub-tropical rain 
can do. When we were not sleeping, eating, or 
going for walks of conscience under a steady ver- 
tical pelt that was like an English thunder-shower 
of the heaviest, not only doubled in volume but in- 
definitely prolonged, we sat in a cool verandah 
bordering the open patio of our hotel and read 
and talked discursively. I think, looking back 

103 



104 W. E. FORD 

upon those days, that we both were quietly revel- 
ling in a sense of release and relaxation. For me, 
the change from the exigencies of school was ce- 
lestial. I read FitzGerald's Omar Khayyam for 
the first time, and Ford grinned with appreciative 
sympathy over my raptures. The very rain, a 
nuisance from the sight-seeing tourist's point of 
view, seemed to me a blessed dispensation that 
gave elbow-room to long-starved thoughts and 
emotions. Also, it stood to me for the washing 
away of many useless accretions, knobby and 
semi-vitrified, that I had brought out with me as 
part of the inevitable impedimenta of the public 
schoolboy. I was to learn later on that Ford was 
as glad of that perpetual downpour as I was, 
and also for his own personal reason. It seemed 
to him to dissolve the haunting trouble that so 
persistently besieged his mind, the trouble of his 
broken relations with Mary Worthington, and to 
symbolise in the rushing cascades and the ever-ris- 
ing torrents to which it gave birth the sweeping 
away of the inevitable sorrow of frustrated love, 
the washing clean of a new world that awaited the 
interpretation of an observer newly cleansed in 
spirit. 

Teneritfe was indeed, when the rain stopped, a 
new world. We crossed the island on foot, and re- 
joiced over the world-famous view from Hum- 
boldt's Corner; and we climbed the Peak from 
Villa Orotava, where (to mingle small things 
with' great) Ford had a recalcitrant tooth stopped 
by a Spanish dentist, and returned wishing the 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 105 

dentist had been left-handed, since his left hand 
had smelt of garlic alone, while his right hand, 
which he chiefly employed, smelt not only of gar- 
lic bnt of bad cigars as well. The Peak of Tene-> 
riffe has the habit of spreading out an mnbrella 
of cloud, during a few hours from midday on- 
wards, along the plane of a ridge that encircles, 
craterwise, its topmost cone; and as we ate our 
sandwiches upon the summit — itself a smallish 
crater, of which we had perched ourselves upon 
the highest tooth in its serration — the dazzling 
cloud-canopy grew and solidified in whiteness 
some three thousand feet below us, until we might 
have been sitting islanded upon that brownish- 
black sugarloaf of lava rock, surrounded by a sea 
of which the cloud-stratum merged almost imper- 
ceptibly, at its tenuous edges, into the actual ocean 
ten thousand feet below it. ^^Well,'' said Ford, 
**here we are out of the world at last!'' and his 
words had a ring that I can interpret now as the 
expression of his first sense of full escape since 
*'the world'' had laid hold upon him. Then, I 
only registered his remark (such was my egoism) 
as a sympathetic recognition of my own sense of 
a new and a magnificently picturesque freedom 
from scholastic ties. 

We were not to stay long in Teneriife. The 
day after our return from Orotava to Santa Cruz, 
Ford came into conflict with a Spaniard whom he 
found beating a small girl in a by-street. There 
was a tussle, and the man drew a knife, which 
Ford at length succeeded in wrenching from him 



106 W. E. FORD 

and throwing away ; this accomplished, he let his 
sufficiently bruised and dejected adversary go. I 
think that this contemptuous clemency, even more 
than a rankling sense of defeat, roused the re- 
venge-obsession that proved to have taken hold 
upon the bully, who made such a nuisance of him- 
self in the character of a lurking peril, that we de- 
cided to go elsewhere rather than be bothered 
either with the incessant watchfulness that be- 
came the price of Ford^s continued existence un- 
stabbed (there were two rather comically abortive 
attempts) or with the unknown complications and 
delays of the Santa Cruz equivalent for police- 
court procedure that would have been necessary 
to bring the offender to book. Also, Ford was far 
from defending his intervention in the first in- 
stance, claiming that he had interfered solely 
through the workings of an obscure British in- 
stinct on behalf of a child who quite possibly, ac- 
cording to Santa Cruz standards, had dared and 
merited her punishment by some too effective 
chain of Canary-Spanish insults. **I dare say 
he's just as right in wanting to knife me as I was 
in punching his jaw," said Ford as he summed 
up the case; and in leaving Santa Cruz he left 
any final judgment of the main issue not to go by 
default, but to resolve itself in terms of relative 
values. 

We had intended in any case to see some of the 
less-visited islands of the group, and after a visit 
to Fuerteventura and Lanzarote, interesting to us 
scientifically but unproductive of biographical in- 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 107 

cident, we found ourselves at Palma, ^ and in an 
environment that was literally to open up a new 
chapter of existence for Ford. It is my business 
to suppress detail that would be appropriate only 
in a book of travels, and I am trying to look back 
upon the peacefully crowded months of our sub- 
jection to the spell of this fortunate island with 
a view to selecting the pictures and the incidents 
that best typify the side of Ford and of Ford's 
later outlook which was then in the making; and, 
as a rule for my general guidance, I am relying 
upon the plan of giving chief place to the things 
that Ford in his later maturity chiefly remem- 
bered in conversation, or referred to in the midst 
of a discussion for illustration of the argument 
that he wished to put forward. 

By this criterion our first view of the possibili- 
ties of Palma, both scenic and, as it afterwards 
proved, sociological, certainly calls for an attempt 
at description. We had climbed on mule-back, 
for endless hours it seemed, to the crest of the 
pass that provides difficult communication — a 
mere foot-track — between the side of the island 
that faces East and trades through Teneriffe with 
Europe, and the side that faces West and trades 
largely with Cuba. We did not then know that 
the west-looking side was in this sense nearer to 
lands distant by the breadth of the Atlantic than 
to the Palma of the eastern slopes, and it was with 

*Not to be confused with Las Palmas, an island as tourist- 
ridden as Teneriffe; still less, of course, with the town that is the 
capital of Majorca. 



108 W. E. FORD 

an impulse of aesthetic rather than geographical 
exaggeration that Ford exclaimed as we topped 
the ridge, *^I say! This is another universe, you 
know ! ' ' 

A glory of sunset colouring bathed in gold the 
grey and brown weathering of the volcanic crags 
whose tumbled masses formed the first precipi- 
tous slope beneath us. A few hundred feet down 
began a belt of the magnificent Canary pines, 
dwindling from the nearest monarch, visibly gi- 
gantic, to a distant featheriness of dark green 
shot with the red-gold of sunlit stems and 
branches, beyond which the single giants that 
had strayed from the belt a little way into the 
shelving plain below might have been the tiniest 
of dwarf trees. The plain, a long sweep down to 
the coast, was sheeted with almond blossom. All 
around, the Atlantic basked and gleamed inimit- 
ably, shading off at the high, indefinable horizon 
into the vibrating opalescence of the sky's mar- 
gin, an opalescence that cleared into deepening 
blue above, and warmed through palest yellow to 
full orange as it neared the sun. 

After a long pause to take in the marvel of it 
all, and to watch the afterglow creep up, richer 
gold than ever, we started downwards, deeply 
moved, scarcely heeding the feats of equilibrium 
by which our mules negotiated the sudden turns 
and drops of the rocky path. (We had soon learnt 
that they knew best how to pick their way, wisely 
disregarding any inexpert attempt at guidance.) 
I remember questioning whether Palma could pos- 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 109 

sibly live up to the first impression that it had 
given us. Ford turned to our muleteer with a 
remark in his fluent Spanish upon the beauty of 
the island. The man replied with a grave smile 
that it was '^ quiet,'' ^ but that here men were 
happy. ''I can believe it/' said Ford to him, and 
*^that sounds good enough!" to me. 

The dusk came up and met us as we entered 
the pine-belt, and the sound of shod hoofs upon 
bare rock was quieted by a carpeting of pine- 
needles, and presently out of the darkening silence 
we were overtaken by lights and voices, and a 
party of women carriers, basket on head, came 
swinging bare-footed down the difficult path with 
little torches of resinous pine-splinters in their 
hands. Erect and supple, warm-skinned and clear- 
eyed, they made a very gracious picture in the 
flickering glow that spaced them out against the 
dusky forest as our party halted to greet them 
and to take light from them for torches of our 
own. Ford fell into talk with them and the mule- 
teer as we went on together, still, I think, fol- 
lowing up our half -uttered train of thought about 
a place that should unite with its beauty of as- 
pect a correlative beauty of human character. I 
missed the greater part of the talk (my Spanish 
was still in the elementary stage) ; but I could 
hear at least the open frankness of their tones, 
and when at length the women took a by-path, 

* I should translate his quieto as ' * beautiful " if it were not for 
the pero (''but") that succeeded it. It is thus that we in the 
country use the word ''quiet" to warn the urban visitor not to 
expect variety entertainments. 



110 W. E. FORD 

calling out good-nights, Ford drew to my side ra- 
diant with enthusiasm. ^'That^s the sort of per- 
son to be ! " was his exordium, and he went on to 
dwell upon the blessings of the unsophisticated 
life. Doubtless these jolly people had their own 
sophistications (they had : we were yet to see the 
ladies of Palma on a Sunday, their figures con- 
strained into black dresses of a parodied Euro- 
pean cut, their natural tan obliterated with rice- 
powder) ; but these things could be nothing to th^ 
fundamental genuineness of their lives. The^ 
looked at you and spoke to you like children, but 
like wise, mature children, and with an instinctive, 
unconscious poetry of gesture and utterance. 
They were humanity with its feet on the real 
earth. ^ ^ We 're going to learn a lot in this place, ' ' 
Ford summed it up. I felt sceptical — I also felt 
tired, for we had been thirty-six hours awake — 
and inclined to refer his enthusiasm to a purely 
aesthetic cause; but he had simply made a jump 
to the truth, as was his way. The people of 
Palma were uniquely natural; though when I 
woke the next morning in the primitive inn that 
we had made our pied-a-terre to find a dozen of 
them in my bedroom admiring and discussing 
such clothes as I had unpacked and scattered over- 
night, my eighteen-year-old prudery was disposed 
to think that naturalness could be carried too far. 
But Ford, looking in, was delighted with the inci- 
dent, and expounded my wardrobe to my callers 
with great freshness and zest before they with- 
drew, politely wishing us good morning. 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 111 



From the little inn at El Paso we began to make 
exploration of Western Palma. The island con- 
sists of the inner and the outer slopes of a very 
large, long-extinct volcano, ^ and we had come to 
it chiefly in order to follow up von Buch ^s theory 
of volcanic origins — a fine piece of large-scale 
objective work that Ford had planned for the wid- 
ening of my scientific horizon; but he now post- 
poned the study of the crater, which was to have 
been our first objective, for the sake of the more 
vital education that we should acquire together 
(as he put it) by looking into the nature of a hu- 
man society that promised something like a reve- 
lation of human values. 

We talked with our stalwart innkeeper, a mine 
of information and of wise commentary upon lo- 
cal affairs, always keen to exchange with us de- 
tails and aspects of our respective civilisations 
(he decided in the end, when Ford had overcome 
the reluctance of his courtesy, that he preferred 
his own — though he confessed to a child-like long- 
ing to see a railway train or a motor car, modern 
miracles, to him, of equal incredibility) ; we talked 

* Geography of Palma. — Cut a pear in half and put one half upon 
a plate with the cut surface downwards and the stalk end pointing 
south. At the top scoop out a conical hole nearly as deep as the 
thickness of the half -pear and a little wider than half the pear's 
breadth. On the south-western side cut a ravine that allows the 
juice to drain from the bottom of the hole on to the plate. The 
hole represents the crater of Palma, broken down on its south- 
west side, and the juice the river that flows through the break to 
the sea; and if you carved the rest of the half pear into ridges and 
minor ravines, leaving a steep main ridge from the crater to the 
southernmost point, you would have a very fair rough representa- 
tion of the island in exaggerated relief. 



112 W. E. FORD 

with a marvellously wrinkled old woman who 
wove silk, pure cocoon silk of the rarest quality, 
upon a hand-loom generations older than herself, 
and she told us much — but not her opinion of ma- 
chine-looms, for she persisted in regarding them 
as an imaginative joke of Ford's; we talked with 
a grizzled goatherd among the crags who, when 
fairly launched upon a description of the ways of 
goats that had all the quality of a Georgic, broke 
off at sight of Ford's intent face to turn to me, 
with a wave of his hand towards Ford, and utter 
the single word ^^Hermoso!'' ^ in a tone as heart- 
felt as it was unaffected (I admired the equally 
frank composure with which Ford received and 
put aside the high compliment), before the nar- 
rative about his goats resumed its course. We 
made one open and friendly acquaintanceship af- 
ter another around the countryside, and more 
than confirmed our muleteer's opinion. Here, in- 
deed, men could be very happy. I asked Ford 
what he thought was the matter with them all. 
**Well, to begin with," he said, *^ there are no 
poor here^ — and no rich." 

We went in search of rich folk, and tramped 
down through banana groves to Tazacorte, the 
coast town where we were told that wealthy mer- 
chants lived. They had heard from afar, by the 
immemorial wireless communicaton of the Canary 
people — a whistling code that seems to have at- 

* Untranslatable; but, roughly, something between our words 
* ' handsome ' ' and ' * beautiful. ' ' The derivation from Hermes gives 
the best clue to a further meaning. 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 113 

tained an extraordinary perfection of expressive- 
ness — that the notorious English visitors were 
coming, and we descended the steep chimney of 
a by-street, to find a black-coated deputation 
awaiting us, courtly and amicable, in the market 
square. Apparently they had been at pains to 
discover, from some linguist among them, the cor- 
rect English salutation; the phrase was not ex- 
actly right, but they bowed and said ''Good-bye" 
with an intonation which reassured us that it was 
welcome, not prompt valediction, that they in- 
tended. They contended for the privilege of en- 
tertaining the strangers, and the victor regaled 
us with a luncheon of remarkable liberality and 
interest, and brought out for the occasion a bottle 
of Canary wine that had a venerable delicacy of 
flavour. Here, unmistakably, was our typical rich 
man of Palma; and the task of drawing him out 
was no test of Ford's skill in this direction. He 
took a simple-minded pleasure in laying bare to 
us all the schemes and subtleties of a captain of 
industry ; and then he took us round his estate and 
his fruit-packing sheds to show us his work and 
his workers in the concrete. We inspected criti- 
cally and exhaustively, as though our kindly host 
had been our bitterest enemy. 

When we got home Ford declared that his 
search for any sign of unhappiness or discontent 
in western Palma was at an end. It was time, he 
said, for us to go about our geological business, 
investigate the crater, and try meanwhile to di- 



114 W. E. FORD 

gest the inoompreliensible phenomenon presented 
by an entirely happy race of people. 

Our landlord took into his own hands the ar- 
rangements for our camp in the C alder a,^ and 
found out through that extraordinary facility of 
communication by word of mouth which always 
astonishes the traveller in regions where no other 
communication, exists (in this case, surely, the 
Canary code of whistling signals could not have 
been employed) that we should be welcome to the 
use of certain eligible caves, sometimes tenanted 
by goatherds, which opened upon a large and a 
not too accessible ledge below the steepest of the 
crater-wall, within reach of a spring. Here he 
proposed to send us a mule daily (it would be 
the best part of a day's journey there and back) 
with fresh milk and provisions. A friendly alter- 
cation arose between him and Ford over this plan. 
We were paying ten pesetas a day (about 7s.) for 
taking up the whole of the small accommodation 
of the inn; and we had found that Don Antonio's 
idea of an inclusive charge precluded our offering 
a halfpenny for any extra requirements — even for 
the handsome brass candlesticks that he bought 
for us when we wanted more light of an evening 
— without grieving him deeply. Now he main- 
tained with the tenacity of a Shylock that the con- 
tract must still hold good. Mule-hire, the only 
expensive necessity in the island (for mules have 

* Crater. I detest a description of travel that is peppered with 
avoidable foreign terms, but I must be allowed this word (which 
we always used for the wonderful place) if only for its cadence. 
The accent falls, of course, upon the long e. 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 115 

to be imported) would come to 71/2 pesetas a day; 
and on the remainder he claimed the right to fur- 
nish us with camp equipments and provisions, 
also keeping our rooms inviolate till our return. 
All Ford's resources of dialectic were in vain; 
Don Antonio stood there on his bond. We could 
only determine to take it out of him when the 
time came to make him a parting present. 

We had thought of the Caldera as a geological 
object-lesson; we found it a wonderland. As we 
rode up the great sinuous ravine that leads to it 
the crags towered higher and higher, till as we 
rounded the final bend their steep slopes parted, 
scissor-wise, to reveal the distant ridge of the 
enormous bowl. Then we turned to mount the 
left-hand slope of the ravine by a winding path 
that denied a further view, till at long last we 
came out upon a ledge in the Caldera itself, some 
five thousand feet up. The encircling rim, nine 
miles across, was another two thousand feet above, 
and the dark cliffs rose to it ever more precipi- 
tously ; below us sloped less steeply a vast ridged 
amphitheatre of pine forest that broke into green 
valleys far below. The sun was nearing the west- 
ern cliff-edge that almost overhung us as we 
wound along the track, and when at length we had 
unloaded and, the mules dismissed, had made our 
simple preparations for the evening, the crater 
was filled with the luminous golden haze that 
heralded the sunset. The atmospheric colour 
deepened and brightened till the cliffs at the fur- 
thest edge might have been carved out of new, 



116 W. E. FORD 

shimmering bronze. Suddenly, deep violet shadow 
struck the forest depths below us, and spread 
down, down to the bottom and then slowly up the 
further side, engulfing the gold in mystery. At 
last the distant, burnished ridge stood out alone 
beneath a sky of vibrating blue, and above a 
cavernous hemisphere of purple twilight ; and we 
watched the still-ascending shadow till the last 
peak (it shone like a planet) had been swallowed 
up, and the Caldera lay in a dream of grey dusk 
beneath the dome of sapphire that deepened over- 
head. 

Our human needs of supper and the warmth of 
a camp fire seemed petty, as Ford remarked, after 
so stupendous a sight, and the ruddy blaze of our 
fire and its glow upon neighbouring rocks and 
tree-trunks, disturbing a thousand flickering 
shadow^s, suggested a tremulous attempt in minia- 
ture to emulate the glory that we had seen. It 
was natural that Ford's talk should tend, as he 
put it, towards a justification of man's doings in 
the face of Nature, and, more particularly, to- 
wards an effort for comprehension of our Palma 
friends' innate happiness. ^^ Happiness is our 
first justification for living." I remember that he 
premised, *4f it isn't our last." 

I must paraphrase Ford, if I am to attempt a 
rendering of his thesis that evening, as closely 
as my memory will serve me after a thirteen 
years' interval. ^' Let's suppose something," he 
said (this was always a favourite gambit of his), 
**and see how it works." His supposition was 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 117 

that natural beauty works upon the mind of man, 
when nothing is present to pull the mind out of 
harmony with it, like a kind of moral magnetism, 
continually and imperceptibly drawing thought 
and action into kinship with itself. To my common- 
place query whether people bom and brought up 
in surroundings of the most inspiring beauty did 
not grow up insensitive to them through sheer 
habituation, he answered, ^^Let^s suppose that 
they appreciate them unconsciously, just as a man 
who has always been truthful and brave, let us 
say, goes on caring for truth and is continually 
showing courage in its defence without a moment's 
consciousness that he's doing anything out of the 
way. Now then — take the saying, *^It is more 
blessed to give than to receive.'* That isn't 
morals, it's aesthetics. We all understand it to 
mean that it's finer — it's more beautiful. And 
here we have these people who have got a sense 
of beauty — so we're supposing — and they carry 
it out, simply and naturally. They prefer Give 
to Get as a matter of taste. Well, Give happens 
to be a very much better working philosophy of 
life, when every one carries it out at once as they 
do ; and the result is sound economics and general 
contentment. And contented people can spare an 
eye for the beautiful — and there we are back at 
the beginning of the circle." 

I set him off again by bringing to light a doubt 
that had been underlying my own appreciation of 
the delightful Palma temperament. They surely 
could not be in any way progressive; one could 



118 W. E. FORD 

not see them mounting to any higher level of mind, 
or producing a literature or an art; they seemed 
fated to go round and round in the circle of which 
he had spoken, happy, but always on the same 
unaltering plane of happiness. Nine-tenths of 
them, for instance, were illiterate and seemed 
likely to remain so. Ford agreed that happiness 
in a closed circle was a vain thing, and then lit up 
with a new idea — I paraphrase him again : ' ^ The 
circle's only a foundation, a basis. These people 
have got the right basis of happiness. But you 
can't see the fun of it unless it's a basis they can 
build upon to raise themselves. Well, look here; 
suppose the circle is really a spiral — at each cir- 
cuit they find themselves a bit higher up than 
before. If so, it's a spiral that must rise jolly 
slowly, I grant you. But what are the things that 
twist people's circle of happiness upwards! Your 
mind jumps to literature and art as the visible 
signs of a rise in the scale, with reading and writ- 
ing for a first beginning. Education's the force 
that sets the spiral mounting at a respectable 
angle; but education's no earthly use until you've 
got a sound circle of happiness to start from. 
When your life just zig-zags about aimlessly from 
one discontent into another, it 's no particular fun 
to have education twisting you up and letting you 
down again. That's what happens to us civilised 
Europeans, for the most part; we've got the edu- 
cation, of a kind, but not the sound basis of life 
for it to work from. These people have got the 
basis, but not the education." 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 119 

I asked him what he meant by education, and 
he gave me a definition that impressed me enough 
to make me write it down afterwards. * ' One gen- 
eration takes pains to shape its experience into a 
ladder by which the next can climb — that's all.*' 
And he went on to abandon his metaphor of a 
spiral of progress for a figure in which each gen- 
eration made its own circle of happiness and 
achievement, and raised from it ladders by which 
the next could climb to another and a higher 
circle. The resulting structure we call a civilisa- 
tion; and when either the base is faulty or the 
successive circles become increasingly distorted, 
the civilisation topples. The civilisation of the 
Athenians depended upon slavery; that was the 
fatal kink in their basic ^^ circle of happiness." 
Roman civilisation, better based (Ford intensely 
admired the early Romans), became twisted out 
of recognition when Rome became a parasite upon 
conquered provinces. European civilisation . . . 
well, Europe had a good deal to learn from places 
like Palma and Palestine before it could consider 
itself in any way safe. Palma was a working 
model, not of human life at its highest and finest, 
but of humanity upon a sound primary basis. On 
this partial conclusion we let the problem rest, 
and turned to the question of bed-making upon a 
basis of hay left by the goatherds in our caves. 
The hay proved a deliciously aromatic mattress, 
and the stars in the night sky at the cave's mouth 
were magnificent, though we should not have 
watched them for so long if that hay had been less 



120 W. E. FORD 

full of entomological interest. Ford declared, next 
morning, that fleas had formed a complete circle 
of happiness around his waist — of course upon 
the debased, parasitic level of Get, not Give. 

The projected geological work claimed our days, 
and we studied the Caldera mth fair thorough- 
ness, clambering, hammering, measuring, calculat- 
ing ; and it was only at intervals, and, as he liked 
to put it, for fun, that Ford recurred to the simple 
main principle which had emerged of its own ac- 
cord from his supple handling of our discussion. 
It has always seemed to me fundamental, as the 
groundwork of any philosophy of life whether for 
the individual or for a society. Happiness, for 
any creature above the level of pulex irritans, is 
found, ultimately, only in giving; and real giving 
is possible only to those who possess happiness, 
since in the last analysis happiness is the only 
gift that there is. This Ford called a ^'virtuous 
circle." I remember wondering, naively enough, 
why so clear and simple a first principle had not 
become translated by now into universal human 
practice. Ford, smiling at the colossal dimen- 
sions of the question, gave as a grain of explana- 
tion that a virtuous circle was always mistrusted 
and decried — ^'sour grapes, you know'' — by 
people who couldn't see their own way into it. I 
recall from another talk, following upon the ar- 
rival of our mule-boy with a mail that brought 
disquieting news from home, that a misgiving of 
mine rose to expression whether Ford were not 
giving to happiness too basic a position in human 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 121 

life as it has to be lived. I had been taught to 
attach a certain dignity to suffering; and there 
was the question of the stimulus of unhappiness 
— the phrase ^^ divine discontent'^ lurked some- 
where at the back of my mind. Ford jumped at 
once, not to a modification but to an extension of 
his thesis. Discontent is good when it is the 
straining out after a happiness that can be seen 
but cannot yet be reached, and the standard of 
this high discontent is raised upon the standard 
of happiness that has preceded it. Discontent 
without the underlying belief in joy is stagnant, 
a breeder of diseases. And the dignity of suffer- 
ing depends upon its being borne with joy, or with 
the grim variant of joy that is called fortitude. 
It is the pre-existing standard and quality of 
happiness that determines the dignity. There is 
no beauty in suffering itself, but only in the 
human spirit that is too great to be submerged 
by it. 

I am setting down very clumsily the few things 
that I can recall with any clearness of Ford's 
philosophising as we roamed the Caldera, or 
talked in the twilight after the daily miracle — it 
never grew less miraculous — of the Caldera sun- 
set. I miss his freshness of simile and illustra- 
tion; and I can never hope to make words express 
the way in which his face would light up with the 
development of an idea, the radiation that came 
from him of pure joy in an intellectual quest. 
The equality in which he let me stand to him was 
a continual marvel. He made nothing of the im- 



122 W. E. FORD 

maturity of an opinion or a criticism, and never 
dreamed of using his skill to make a mere debat- 
ing point in favour of his argument at the mo- 
ment. With a theory in the full flood of exposi- 
tion he would pause to take up an objection due 
as much to slowness of wit as to the sight of 
any flaw in his statement, and would examine and 
reinterpret it with all his power of sympathetic 
understanding, finally working it, transformed, 
into the structure of his own thesis. He gave me 
a most inspiring sense that I really participated 
in and brought material to the building. It is 
when I came to reconstruct that I find out how 
far he was beyond me all the time. 

One day we took a holiday from volcanic origins 
and went down through the pine-belt and the 
lower ravines to the bottom of the Caldera. We 
could see from our ledge that there was a house 
down by the stream — the tiniest of dolls' houses 
it looked — and we had seen human specks crawl- 
ing about the green slopes around it; and the 
many fig-trees around the spot, bare of leaves 
at this season, and each a tangle of grey branches 
that looked from so far above like a small, fixed 
puff of pale blue smoke, told of deliberate plant- 
ing. We inferred a farmstead, and took no food 
with us. A longer descent than we had looked 
for, lengthened by the necessity of climbing again 
and again out of one ravine that persistently led 
US' off our line and into another that repeated the 
misguiding, brought us sweltering and famished 
to the door of the farmhouse well on into the 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 123 

afternoon. Our knocking brought out a crumple- 
faced old woman, octogenarian at least, but of 
remarkable sprightliness. She knew all about us, 
and was full of regrets that w^e had not sent warn- 
ing of our distinguished visit — our mule-boy could 
have passed on the word, she said. As it was, the 
young folk were out at work, beyond call, and alas ! 
she had no meal to offer that the Senores could 
touch. Ford explained that we were in a condition 
to touch anything eatable, and she brought out 
amid a shower of apologies, diversified by gleams 
of laughter over the thought of the Senores eating 
anything so plebeian, gofiOj which is maize-meal, 
half-malted, and dried figs — ^little black, knobby 
things satisfyingly resistent to the hungry jaw. 
Gofio puzzled us — ^we had each our little heap of 
the brownish, coarse flour. Our hostess instructed 
us to eat it, dry with fingers and thumb. Now 
the native eats gofio in small pinches at a time, 
and for a sufficient reason ; the stufiF turns glutin- 
ous in the mouth, absorbing moisture with the 
avidity of quicklime, and a small teaspoonful taxes 
one's salivary glands to the utmost. Ford and I 
hungrily took sizeable mouthfuls and were bereft 
of speech for many minutes, while the old lady 
crowed with merriment at our industrious mouth- 
ings. 

**Lord, that's a tiring food!" gasped Ford, 
when at length he was able to gasp again. My re- 
sponse was interrupted by an uncontrollable peal 
of laughter from the old lady. It was the first 
time she had heard a foreign language, and it 



124 W. E. FORD 

struck her as the funniest thing in the world. 
Ford realised that this was the reason of her 
mirth, and only made it worse by explaining the 
fact, still in English, to me. **But I don't under- 
stand! I don't understand!" the old lady pro- 
tested, and went off into fresh peals of laughter. 
When she had recovered a little we began, by way 
of homoeopathic treatment, to give her single 
words for things. *^ Plate," we said, pointing. 
^*Fig." ^*Hat." It was no use. The only answer 
was ^^Yo no comprendel^' and another peal. She 
found it so glorious a joke that we made no fur- 
ther attempt to spoil it by elucidation. 

Having disposed of the rest of our gofio — ^it is 
excellent stuff when you go the right way to work 
with it — and munched our figs, we evoked the 
Comic Spirit again by wanting to pay for our 
entertainment. ^* Money! For go fitoV^^ Really 
her glance seemed to say, the famed Senores 
Ingleses were proving the most comical of people ! 
Her eyes still twinkled with amusement as we said 
good-bye. Ford was delighted with the whole in- 
cident, and declared that the old woman's laugh- 
ter was shaking down and settling many things 
in his mind. It was ridiculous to go about ten- 
dering bits of money for the small human services 
that are far sweeter if they are left as gifts. **It 
isn't paying, it's tipping," he said; and went on 
to speak of tips as part of the machinery that 
bolsters up our sham superiorities. Other people 

* * * A little gofio. ' ' The Canary people carry the Spanish love for 
the diminutive ^'-ito" to any extreme. 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 125 

in Palma had obviously thought us mannerless 
for certain offers of money, and we had wondered 
where they drew the dividing line, beyond which 
payment became an offence; Ford saw now that 
they draw it where payment took on the nature 
of a tip. Free people don't tip one another. 

And difference of language, when you came to 
think of it, was funny enough for anything. We 
could not see the joke of it with the perfect fresh- 
ness of mind that the old woman had brought to 
bear, but we could see the same joke on a smaller 
scale when two people of the same tongue but 
of different thought fell into a discussion — ^it was 
the stock humorous resource of writers of light 
comedy. A great part of the comedy of life, as 
of its tragedy, came of mutual cross-purposes, 
and only humour prevented these from being all 
tragedy. Suppose, now, that we had known no 
Spanish, and had failed to make the old woman 
understand that we were hungry! She would 
have had a monopoly of the humorous view of 
the situation. Ford went on whimsically to re- 
construct a lost chapter in the story of the Tower 
of Babel: when the confusion of tongues began, 
half the builders grew hot and angry about it and 
threw bricks at one another, while the other half 
were too weak with laughter to get on with the 
work. And humanity consists of the descendants 
of those two groups — by now somewhat inter- 
mixed, though the pure strain emerges now and 
then. 

Seeing him in such a mood for the drawing of 



126 W. E. FORD 

morals I demanded an interpretation of gofio. 
There was no difficulty about that. Gofio, obvi- 
ously, was the analogue of information — facts — 
the kind of stuff they teach you at school. A 
pinch at a time that one could moisten and mas- 
ticate was good and nutritious ; ladled out by the 
spoonful it was dust and ashes in the mouth. 
This, of course, led to a discussion of education 
that lasted until long after we had got back to 
our cave-home. But I am reserving the attempt 
to reproduce Ford^s views on education for an- 
other chapter. 

By this time we had long abandoned our plan 
for a spring journey through North Africa and 
Italy. At first we had thought that we were only 
postponing this phase of our projected tour to 
the latest reasonable date; but even then Palma 
had hold of us, and soon we knew that we should 
be wasting something more than the tourist's op- 
portunity to see, and afterwards to say that he 
has seen, an interesting diversity of places, if we 
failed to soak in as much of Palma as our utmost 
time-limit would allow. When we returned in 
April to El Paso and to Don Antonio's inn, after 
six weeks in the Caldera, it was to stay there until 
nearly the end of May, seeing more of our old 
friends — '^old" to us in our character of returned 
adventurers — reviving and revising earlier im- 
pressions and testing them for false tints of rose 
now that the first blush of enthusiasm had worn 
off, rather than breaking fresh ground. El Paso 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 127 

stood every test that we could apply. It was a 
very delightful place to come back to. 

What was it, in brief, that Ford ^* soaked in" 
during the whole of this time? The central im- 
pression of the place and its people seems to me 
as definite as the meaning of a movement in a 
Beethoven symphony, and as indefinable. There 
was a unique harmony between natural beauty 
and fundamental human values. . . . 

I think the formula that Ford threw off, that 
first evening in the Caldera, is as explanatory as 
any that can be conveyed in words. He had seen 
human life revolving in its natural orbit. He had 
realised the full circle, the perfect round of which 
only the broken arcs — arcs of a larger circle, how- 
ever, which has yet to find its completion — are to 
be found in the complex civilisation of Europe. 
He had seen happiness as a norm of man's exist- 
ence, and he had seen, springing from the soil 
of happiness, *Hhe deep desire to give and give 
again" that shows most nobly, it is true, as a 
character of the troubled spirit, but only when 
that spirit has made happiness its inner founda- 
tion. He brought from Palma a certain tranquil- 
lity that was proof against many of the doubts 
and despairs by which we are beset. Always 
deeply concerned for humanity, he never found 
his idealism disappointed into a doubt of human 
potentialities. He had known a reality that gave 
a permanent foundation to the ideal, and it made 
him fearless in facing realities that seemed to 
contradict the ideal. And with a firm footing 



128 W. E. FORD 

upon this reality lie was to reach upward and 
grasp a conception of individual life that made 
him a force among those with whom and for 
whom he worked, and an enigma to those whom 
he passed upon his way. From his time in Palma 
onwards Ford was his own man. 



CHAPTER VII 

Nothing could have been in more acute contrast 
with Ford's deep impression of Palma than his 
next experience of a human society — the *^ soci- 
ety," in the shallower sense of the word, of a 
big cosmopolitan hotel, the centre of a fashion- 
able resort in Switzerland. We came to St. Mo- 
ritz by the quickest route — via London — arriving 
in the first week of June, a month before the first 
assembling of the folk whose holiday movements 
are recorded in public print ; for a full month the 
wonders of a Swiss midsummer were our chief 
concern; but this period seemed in later perspec- 
tive to have been only a preparation — the setting 
of majestic scenery for the entrance of characters 
absurdly incongruous. 

Our first friend at St. Moritz, Wieland the 
guide, a great brown bear of a man with the in- 
stincts of a child, was another matter. We iden- 
tified him directly we had him among his moun- 
tains as a true Swiss exponent of the Palma 
spirit. Ford was delighted with a remark of his 
when we were on the way to our first real climb 
— the Piz Julier. Starting at three in the morn- 
ing we had driven, half asleep, some distance up 
the road that skirts the southern slopes of the 
mountain on its way to the Julier Pass. Ford 

129 



130 W. E, FORD 

and I dozed on the back seat of the aged landau. 
Wieland, massively huddled upon the seat facing 
us, with his back to the driver, suddenly stretched 
himself, yawned, and pointed to the distance be- 
hind us. *^Kommt die stolzie ^ Bernina heraus,*' 
he observed. We looked back. The Engadine 
valley lay in blue-grey twilight that brightened 
to the clear azure of piled-up snow-peaks beyond, 
against a deep ultramarine sky still twinkling 
with stars. The summit of the ^^ proud Bernina" 
had just caught the first shaft of the rising sun, 
and stood out in clear, full rose-pink of wonder- 
ful purity. The unconscious poetry of Wieland's 
phrase exactly described the mountain's rose- 
crowned dignity. Incedit vera dea. 

Afterwards, as we talked, Ford asserted Wie- 
land's absolute human superiority, upon his own 
ground, to any of the climbers whom he escorted. 
He was their minister, and a minister who knew 
the mysteries that he served. All the members 
of the Alpine Club put together could not have 
mustered the three-o 'clock-in-the-morning cour- 
age to utter, if they could have thought of it, a 
phrase about a mountain's soul that he threw 
off between a yawn and a chuckle. He was there; 
his clients were ephemeral. The very fact that 
he was there, incidentally, to risk his life for them 
if they got into difficulties made his superiority 
finally impregnable. He would do it with such 
magnificent unconcern — for its own sake rather 
than for theirs. He would save a life (it was not 

* I must render the pretty Swiss variant of the German final e. 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 131 

he who told us that he had saved three on one 
occasion, at the expense of a permanent rope- 
mark round his waist) as he would salute the 
proud Bernina, Avithout the complicated trouble 
that we call a motive. 

**I say," Ford suddenly interrupted himself, 
^4sn't a conscious motive always the result of a 
mental conflict 1 ' ' He mused, staring as though he 
had stumbled upon a significant train of thought. 
(We were resting, after a day's climb with Wie- 
land, on a terrace that looked down upon the St. 
Moritz Lake). Then he went on to argue that 
a conscious motive must always be an imperfect 
motive, an impulse not assured enough to do with- 
out deliberate justification; not the less valuable 
for that, but, from the very fact of its being con- 
scious, a mere crude approximation, a stepping- 
stone, to the true motivation that is unconscious 
(^ inspired," Ford put it) and gets things done 
purely for their own sake, or for the sake of the 
spiritual need that is fulfilled in the doing. 

This is to summarise very briefly the gist of a 
rambling talk, the talk in which a man, physically 
tired, lets his mind and his tongue run on as they 
will, without any such ^* conscious motive'' as 
Ford was himself, as he talked, beginning to ana- 
lyse. Perhaps he analysed the better — the more 
intuitively — for the tiredness that gave him full 
excuse for letting his thought roam at ease; I 
remember a sense that subtle undercurrents of 
meaning flowed unregarded beneath the surface 
of his discursive, casual statement, and I have 



132 W. E. FORD 

since recalled that half -hour again and again to 
explain a side of Ford^s outlook and of his char- 
acter which left many people bewildered. He 
was to form decisions and to act upon them with 
such ** magnificent unconcern *' — to borrow the 
phrase that he himself used of Wieland's matter- 
of-fact heroism. But it was later on that this 
element in his nature manifested itself; that con- 
versation seemed at the moment isolated, the curi- 
ous, irrelevant, vital offshoot of an active brain 
half -bemused by the fatigue of his quiescent body. 

Philosophy, climbing (with a sub-interest in 
glacial action), and a delight that was not exclu- 
sively botanical in the June efflorescence of the 
Alps were the chief features of the tutorial 
scheme that Ford had in mind for my time in 
Switzerland. The end of June was to have been 
the end of my six months abroad, but when the 
final week drew near I wrote home to beg for an 
extension and was granted two months' further 
leave. I have often felt irrationally glad that I 
thus forwarded, unknowingly, a train of circum- 
stance which put a great work and a great happi- 
ness within Ford's reach. If he had left Switz- 
erland in June he would have been most unlikely 
ever to have met the Wisharts. 

The July irruption of tourists drawn from the 
most fashionable strata filled us with despair. 
We thought at first of flight and of concealing 
the disgrace of our quiet tastes in humbler sur- 
roundings, but Ford's final verdict — again fate- 
ful — was that we had better see it through. We 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 133 

were out for realities ; in Palma we had seen one 
kind of social reality, and at St. Moritz we had 
the opportunity to see another kind, at the oppo- 
site extreme. Artificiality, he maintained, must 
be counted among the realities if you are taking 
civilised people into the reckoning. 

There were people who did little but play golf, 
where the flowers had been mown away to make 
a course, under the gaze of the snow-peaks ; there 
were people who danced by night and talked the 
scandal of European capitals by day; there were 
people who talked Art, read poetry, and played 
upon the excellent grand piano in the hotel draw- 
ing-room (one elderly Viennese lady played Beet- 
hoven with exactly the beauty of touch and phras- 
ing that is appropriate to the lighter passages of 
Mozart) ; there were people — these we liked best 
— who had come to be jolly, and were jolly; but 
there was no one who fitted the Switzerland that 
we had begun to realise. And as Ford said. Why 
should they? None of them belonged to Wieland^s 
universe, or could pass through it seeing with 
Wieland's eyes, for the single reason that they 
did not want to ; and those whose attitude frankly 
confessed their lack of desire for the real Switz- 
erland were infinitely better company than those 
who thought it incumbent upon them to yearn by 
moonlight or to gush by day whenever they could 
remember to do so. 

Mr. Wishart came to us one day, in the crowded 
dining-room of the hotel, like a breath of fresh 
air. There was no table vacant, and the head 



134 W. E. FORD 

waiter brought him to ours with the audible as- 
surance that we were pleasant gentlemen. He 
explained in the crisp accent of the cultivated 
Scotsman that he had walked over from Pontre- 
sina to prospect for further easy climbs, befitting 
an elderly man, \\dth the idea of spending a few 
days at St. Moritz later on for their accomplish- 
ment. By way of a sample, Ford and I took him 
up the little Piz Nair — a mere afternoon stroll 
that gives a wonderful view — and as we mounted 
the easy path Ford fell into talk with him at once. 
His shrew^d, terse openness had taken Ford^s 
fancy from the start, and he for his part fell an 
immediate victim to Ford. 

As we came down again he invited us to walk 
back to Pontresina and dine with him en famille, 
and we accepted. The family proved to be his 
daughter Margaret and two sons, one older than 
she was, the other — an Edinburgh undergraduate 
— a few years younger. Mr. Wishart had been a 
widower for some years. The talk at dinner con- 
sisted chiefly in a relation of the doings of the 
trio during their father^s absence; they had been 
exploring odd corners of the Morteratsch glacier, 
and the eldest son, an engineer, was impressed by 
Ford's knowledge of glacial action, and was soon 
bombarding him with knotty questions. After 
dinner we had coffee out of doors, and the conver- 
sation becanie more discursive and general. I 
oi:^ght to be able to record some small, significant 
exchange of words, or at least the passing of a 
glance that lingered on its way, between Ford and 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 135 

Margaret Wishart; but I was immersed with her 
younger brother in Scottish public school shop 
— we were both Edinburgh Academicals — and had 
no premonition of a biographer's duty. I only 
remember that Ford and Mr. Wishart, perhaps 
catching an echo of our gossip about Academy 
masters and boys, began a discussion of public 
school education and then of education as a. whole. 
Miss Wishart, I think, played a listening part; 
her elder brother, not greatly interested, present- 
ly fell out and made a third in the Edinburgh 
talk. But the picture of Ford and the two Wish- 
arts, father and daughter, sitting a few yards 
from us, silhouetted against the hazy distance of 
twilight, has remained with me as something sig- 
nificant — no doubt in virtue of events that were 
to follow. 

Ford and I walked back to St. Moritz in the 
moonlight, charged with the task of finding a 
week's accommodation there for the Wishart fam- 
ily. Ford became articulate in praise of Mr. 
Wishart, who was one of the rare people, he said, 
who seem really to know what they are after — 
the kind of man to see instinctively what is worth 
doing, and, having seen, to do it as a matter of 
course. 

They came over a few days later, to a pension 
not far from our hotel, and for the time we were 
practically attached to their party. The final 
grouping of the evening at Pontresina tended to 
persist: Mr. Wishart could not see too much of 
Ford, and Miss Wishart accompanied them upon 



186 W. E. FORD 

the unadventurous climbs that her father affected, 
while the two brothers, both experienced climb- 
ers, very kindly took me under their care for some 
more difficult work. I am afraid my gratitude 
was not so whole-hearted as it might have been. 
I missed my Ford. The more exciting the expe- 
dition, the flatter it seemed without his participa- 
tion and his commentary. I became irrationally 
jealous, not of Mr. Wishart, the real monopolist, 
but of his daughter, the comparatively passive 
agent, and looked out sulkily for signs of Ford's 
preoccupation with her, or hers with him. I must 
confess to feeling a sense of property in him. 
After all, he was my tutor. Ford, meanwhile, 
was glad that I should climb with men who really 
knew the business, and in the evenings tried to 
draw me out over the events of the day, puzzled 
no doubt by the taciturnity of my unconfessed re- 
sentment. Miss Wishart divined the reason of 
my huffishness, though not its apprehensive focus 
upon herself, and tried once or twice to thaw me 
by talking sympathetically of Ford and of the 
debt that I must owe to him. I can see, now, how 
spontaneously gracious was the attempt; but the 
perversity of a jealous mind could see nothing in 
her overtures but a preliminary to pumping me 
about Ford, and the appeal of her quiet charm 
was distorted into a subtle form of attack against 
which I steeled myself. 

It was with an unholy joy that I saw the fam- 
ily leave at last for home, Mr. Wishart reaffirm- 
ing to Ford a cordial invitation (a crowning of- 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 137 

fence!) to go and stay with them when we should 
return. My temperamental foolishness did not 
long outlast their departure, but faded through a 
slight awkwardness — I was used to freedoms of 
self-revelations with Ford, but this was beyond 
my eighteen-year-old powers of confession — into 
oblivion. None the less I had lost my chance of 
realising the first vague inception of an educa- 
tional scheme that Ford and Mr. Wishart had 
been concocting, a scheme that Mr. Wishart 's 
practical idealism was already half prepared to 
set in motion; for Ford, seeing that to mention 
the name of Wishart was to find me inexplicably 
glum and unreceptive, refrained from talking 
about the project of which his mind must then 
have been very full, and I only learnt of it later, 
when it was complete. 

The fast-dwindling remainder of our time of 
travel was tinged with a slight flavour of this bur- 
ied awkwardness, though the sullen temper that 
had been its cause had evaporated. In any case, 
I should have hated the feeling that my unique 
monopoly of Ford's mind was drawing daily 
nearer to its term ; and the Wishart incursion had 
pointed the grievance by exemplifying the readi- 
ness of an outside world to claim him. Ford 
sensed the existence of the hollow that was form- 
ing in me, with its dull, anticipatory ache that 
kept rising to the conscious surface, submerging 
the desire to make our last days the j oiliest and 
the best of all; and I was grateful that no con- 
vention of artificial modesty made him do me the 



138 W. E. FORD 

injustice of pretending that the approaching end 
of an enjoyable time abroad was all my trouble. 
The common observance of professing oneself im- 
potent to evoke love had no meaning for him, 
though I believe he thought all the less, as a rule, 
of the impression he was making; he concealed 
no vanity in the matter because he had none to 
conceal. At this time he met, with extraordinary 
understanding and lightness of touch, my shy, 
clumsy efforts to show some final evidence of de- 
votion, my eagerness to lose no grain of meaning 
in the least thing that he said. He gave me the 
only real solace I could have for the growing in- 
dependence of our separation by accepting frank- 
ly and naturally the small signs of affection and 
indebtedness that I tried to convey. I do not 
know the words that would render the quality of 
that serene, undemonstrative response, but its 
quiet spontaneity made a world's difference. 

He met the Wisharts, I believe, soon after our 
return. Events that have no bearing upon these 
reminiscences of his thoughts and doings kept me 
alike from an Oxford career and from any fuller 
acquaintance with his movements than an occa- 
sional interchange of letters could supply; and 
of his letters (I did not keep them) I recall little 
that accounts for the important autumn of 1903. 
Its importance lies in two facts that I learnt from 
him later on. Mr. Wishart made a definite pro- 
posal of financing a school that Ford should run 
upon his own lines; and my odd, instinctive ap- 
prehension of Miss Wishart 's significance in 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 139 

Ford's life began to be justified. Jealousy, like 
other atavistic and reprehensible instincts of the 
human mind, sometimes jumps to a true intuition. 
The two facts — I draw now upon my later knowl- 
edge — placed Ford in a dilemma. He wanted the 
school passionately; the opening pointed to the 
realisation of a cherished dream; and he viewed 
the attraction that was growing with a fine nat- 
uralness between himself and Miss Wishart as a 
matter of high privilege and promise ; but in this 
he could not feel himself a free man. He was 
bound to Mary Worthington by a subtle code of 
honour in uncertainty. And as yet she had not 
responded to the letter that had announced his 
return to England. He decided that there was 
nothing for it but to temporise until he could be 
more sure of his bearings. At the least, he could 
avoid making Miss Wishart unhappy — he already 
saw that her happiness or unhappiness was near 
to being definitely thrown into the scale, having 
no equipment of artificial self-deprecation to 
blindfold him to the fact. He fell back upon a 
sufficient truth, and told Mr. Wishart that he 
could not take on the management of a school 
until he had dug more deeply than hitherto into 
the records of past educational work. It was 
wholly true that he felt a need to study the writ- 
ings and the experiences of men like Comenius, 
Pestalozzi, and Froebel before embarking, as they 
did, upon an individual venture in education. But 
it was also true that he needed to get away and 
breathe — and wait. I do not know in what terms 



14.0 W. E. FORD 

he told Miss Wishart about that waiting, but there 
was some understanding that he was to find out 
something more than his real attitude towards ed- 
ucation. For Mr. Wishart, the plan for a school 
was in abeyance until the following autumn — the 
autumn of 1904 — but by then the school was to be 
started, if, by then. Ford should find himself psy- 
chologically equal to the task. So Ford took 
rooms in Bloomsbury, and, with a reader's ticket 
for the library of the British Museum as his talis- 
man, he diligently explored the life-stories of 
great educators in the past and — waited, with his 
own life-story in the balance. 

Mary Worthington wrote from her married sis- 
ter's house in the country, and Ford went down 
to see her there. They found all their old lines 
of communication still open ; Ford recalled to him- 
self Browning's wildly apt metaphor of the brok- 
en stick, 

**How fresh the splinters keep and fine — 
Only a touch and we combine ! ' ' 

And of splinters in the more palpable sense there 
seemed to be fewer than before their separation. 
Their old, deeply underlying difference was there, 
as much as ever — probably it was deeper and 
wider than ever; but the regard that they turned 
upon it had mellowed, somehow. They could dif- 
fer without mental exacerbation. Each could ac- 
cept the other's point of view as an inalienable 
fact, if not as truth. 

It is a moot question whether it is possible to be 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 141 

**in love'' with two people at the same moment. 
But — to make a brief digression, for clearness, 
into a region of abstract personalities^ — when A, 
loving B, meets and is attracted to C, there must 
be at least a momentary wavering of the balance 
before it tips decisively in one direction or the 
other. Perhaps it was in such a moment that 
Ford met Mary Worthington again ; at all events 
their meeting left him in two minds, and he could 
not be sure which of the two was veritably his 
own mind. The elements of the difficulty were 
hard to disentangle. Mary Worthington was his 
tried friend, his partner by unspoken compact in 
a relation that was peculiarly their own, a rela- 
tion that must inevitably be broken if he gave 
himself whole-heartedly to another. **I'm a nat- 
ural monogamist, you know," he said to me in 
talking of this time; I had questioned whether a 
true marriage could not co-exist with a unique 
friendship such as was his with Mary Worthing- 
ton, and he was explaining for my benefit^ — I was 
in some need of his experience and guidance — the 
instinct that had then swayed him, as he had since 
thought it out. His point was that the ** unique 
friendship," this kind of intellectual-spiritual re- 
lation, must necessarily be at war with the mar- 
riage relation, must needs, as he put it, ^^ break the 
full circle" that the marriage relation has to es- 
tablish. The married *^ circle of happiness" can- 
not be complete if one of the parties has to fly 
off at a tangent to secure an essential spiritual 
expression and satisfaction outside. 



m W. E. FORD 

Ford's problem, in its simplest terms and as 
concerning his own happiness alone, was whether 
he could bear to leave Mary Worthington and all 
that their relation had meant to him, and, if he 
could, whether he would then be able to bring a 
whole personality, full and unpartitioned, to 
Margaret Wishart. But the problem was not in its 
simplest terms, and did not concern his own hap- 
piness alone. He had not consciously determined 
how he felt towards Miss Wishart; in escaping for 
the time out of the influence of their growing in- 
timacy he had acted upon a hidden impulse of 
which the only conscious elucidation was his de- 
sire to be loyal to that other compact. I think it 
would be true to say that in the first development 
of his friendship with Miss Wishart he had seen, 
like a distant light that may or may not be the 
light of home windows, the potentiality of a com- 
plete and rounded happiness; and that he fled 
precipitately from the vision lest it should draw 
him further before he had made out clearly 
whether the old attachment were his true home 
or only the guest-house that had given him rare 
hospitality by the way. 

It was not solely his own happiness that was 
in question, but he was impelled to make the so- 
lution of the triple complex, so far as his own 
action was concerned, solely his own problem. 
His flight from Miss Wishart had been to save 
her peace of mind, if her underthought should 
have begun to take the same direction as his own, 
from becoming further imperilled. He had waited 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 143 

to put liis relation with Mary Worthington again 
and finally to the test on its own ground, with 
any question of an alternative Miss Wishart left 
aside. If the test failed, if the long-standing bar- 
rier held, and he and Mary Worthington were not 
wholly for one another, he would go free — free 
and lonely, if the other light should prove to have 
been only a will-o'-the-wisp. 

I have spoken of Ford's belief in the reciproc- 
ity of human affection — his conviction that that 
part of an attachment only is real which is re- 
turned, and that a one-sided emotion is mere mir- 
age, springing from the self-deception of those 
who are in love with love, and project their gen- 
eral idea to enhalo a particular person. I see 
every reason to agree with Ford's conviction that 
but for this belief, which he and Mar}^ Worthing- 
ton shared, they would have married, and either 
made one another exceedingly unhappy or settled 
down to the dull truce that is the end of so many 
romantic-seeming unions. Their deep psychical 
attachment, so oddly lacking in certain essential 
links, ran an unusual course; but in type it may 
be far from unusual. How many attachments 
may there not be that end (end, literally) in mar- 
riage? Ford's experience opens up a wide but 
an obscure field of thought. As civilisation and 
the life of the mind develop, the different planes 
of intimacy upon which men and women can meet 
multiply endlessly. Comparatively few of these 
hold out promise for a complete union of lives; 
but the primaeval mate-seeking instinct snatches 



144 W. E. FORD 

at such intimacies to impose upon them its single 
interpretation. Ford and Mary Worthington had 
this experience in full and poignant measure, and 
struggled through it, with a sort of blind honesty, 
to the only true conclusion. How many, in like 
case, succumb to the easy, false conclusion f 

As a matter of psychological clarity, I am sorry 
not to know exactly how it was, and in what terms, 
that the two reached their decision that they were 
not for each other; but as Ford's friend I am 
glad that the curtain has to be rung down before 
the concluding scene. It was his wish that his 
experience might do something to elucidate a dif- 
ficult problem, but it is right that the laying bare 
of that experience should be qualified by a certain 
concluding privacy. He and Mary Worthington 
talked together twice, and parted; and that ends 
— for me, upon a note of not unwelcome reticence 
— the story of their unique association. 

Ford's later analysis of the abstract problem 
remains. I have often thought over that notion 
of his, that there are on the one hand a thousand 
possible intimacies between man and woman, the 
product of recent civilised developments of 
thought and consciousness; and, on the other 
hand, the primordial sex instinct always ready 
to impose its own egoism and to turn good friend- 
ships into bad love affairs. Ford had an idea 
that this might go far to explain the undue pro- 
portion of unhappy or unsatisfactory marriages 
that we see around us. What might be the right 
issue of these intellectual and psychical attrac- 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 145 

tions, he could not say. They ought not to end 
in marriage, if the essential something else were 
not present; they could seldom continue indefi- 
nitely upon their own basis, except on condition 
of celibacy — and then discontent would super- 
vene. Ford could only leave the ultimate solution 
to the future. For an immediate solution, he saw 
hope in the gradual growth of a better mutual 
understanding between the sexes, so that at least 
men and women were coming to realise more 
clearly and consciously where they stood in rela- 
tion to one another, and to realise that not every 
magnetism spells marriage. 

This balm of philosophic explanation came 
later; it did not soothe Ford's present hurt. He 
must have suffered, and suffered for a time ex- 
cruciatingly, under a sense of intolerable loss — 
the loss of his old, unrealisable dream and of the 
realised comradeship that had meant so much to 
him. He knew it was a comradeship that could 
never be revived. 

The way was first opened for me to hear of all 
this long episode, so vital in the story of Ford's 
experience, by one of those queer, untoward acci- 
dents that often wind up an actual story upon a 
note of anti-climax. Six months after Ford's 
parting with Mary Worthington — when (to an- 
ticipate a little) the arrangements for his school 
were in full train, and I, to my delight, had been 
invited to come and take part, as his pupil in the 
art of education — I heard the first breath of a 
malignantly garbled scandal that had been set 



146 W. E. FORD 

afloat. I infer the malignity from the form into 
which the tale, finally disentangled and partially 
run to earth, ended by resolving itself. The story 
that first roused my indignant incredulity was dif- 
ferent enough. In this, as reported to my family 
by a friend who was ^* alarmed to hear^' of my 
proposed re-association with Ford, Mary Worth- 
ington had actually been translated into an apoc- 
ryphal farmer's daughter, deflowered by Ford 
under promise of marriage, and deserted. This 
was too absurdly out of character for even a mo- 
mentary spasm of doubt, and I carried my wrath 
and the crazy legend hot-foot to Ford, to know 
what he could make of the business. As an incip- 
ient headmaster he had of course everything to 
lose if such a rumour had a chance of spreading. 
Ford was as bewildered as I, and inclined merely 
to be amused. His amusement changed to the 
only consuming anger that I ever knew him to 
show as it came out (I will not dwell upon the 
unsavoury process of digging and sifting) that 
the original lie, before it underwent the comedy 
of change incident to underground currency, had 
concerned those last two interviews at the house 
of Mary Worthington 's sister. It was instructive 
study in the ways of Rumour. One friend, more 
loyal than wise, had declared that Mary had been 
^' badly treated.'' (Miss Worthington, I believe, 
had never countenanced any such notion on her 
own behalf.) Another, a victim of the hysterical 
jealousy that it is kindest to consider pathologi- 
cal, had seized the slightly ambiguous phrase and 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 147 

built upon it, knowing nothing of Ford except 
his name, an imaginary scandal that should settle 
Mary Worthington's reputation once and for all. 
Thence the story proliferated into a score of 
equally delectable reincarnations. In several it 
was not Ford, but one acquaintance or another of 
the Worthingtons ' who was implicated. Ford was 
impelled, however, to go and thrash the whole 
matter out with Sir Joshua Worthington, and 
thus at lengi;h to get to the bottom of it. Natur- 
ally, he had to enter upon a complex of explana- 
tions with regard to past innocent secrecies ; there 
were words, but the two ended by parting upon 
respectful if scarcely upon cordial terms. Ford 
did not try to see Mary Worthington again. 

The one small seed of actuality from which the 
ugly absurdity had grown, the impression that 
Mary Worthington had in fact been '^ badly treat- 
ed," stuck in Ford's mind. ^^They really did think 
I had been faithless and ruthless," he said, speak- 
ing of the Worthingtons ' attitude tow^ards the full 
story that had now been told of the friendship 
and its termination. I was angry over the bare 
idea at the time, but it is difficult, on reflection, 
not to see their point of view. 

As they saw it, Ford had been clandestinely 
engaged to Mary Worthington, or semi-engaged, 
which w^as worse (they never came near to under- 
standing what the rare relation had actually been, 
and could only decide that any alliance so peril- 
ously intimate that went unratified by even a se- 
cret engagement was incomprehensible to the 



148 W. E. FORD 

verge of the disreputable), and after allowing her 
to waste her freshest years in these intangible fet- 
ters had sheered off irresponsibly at the moment 
that seemed good to him. His apologia was not 
to be stated in terms that they conld comprehend, 
but he did his best; and they seem to have con- 
cluded that he was genuine but incurably wrong- 
headed. Sir Joshua read him a lecture upon the 
heedless selfishness into which he had betrayed 
himself. 

There was a certain inequitable justice in the 
indictment. Through the years of his comrade- 
ship with Mary Worthington, Ford had steadily 
and in part consciously disregarded the Worth- 
ington standard. He had always acted simply 
upon his instinctive conception of what was right 
in itself. Such a mode of life has its drawbacks, 
and half the business of life is to determine 
whether these drawbacks are worth taking into 
account. Any one who falls into the habit of lis- 
tening for an inner voice and acting in accord- 
ance with its promptings, not in conformity with 
an accepted, all-adequate rule of thumb, must 
needs appear selfish at times to those who are 
out of the secret. In this the gentlest seeker 
for sincerity must share the burden of Nietzsche's 
trampling superman. 

Ford's school came into being in the autumn of 
1904. Mr. Wishart had at first wanted it to be a 
boarding-school, for the sake of keeping Ford's 
influence and method of discipline unbroken, but 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 149 

at length lie came round to Ford's strong opinion 
in favour of a day school. I was asked to many 
of their discussions, so that when I should come 
to take my minor share in the work I might be 
well grounded in the substance of their conclu- 
sions ; and I remember one talk in particular that 
brought out Ford's root objection to the board- 
ing-school system. He traced to it two effective 
brakes upon the vital progress of upper- and mid- 
dle-class people, attributing indeed to these two 
factors much of the obvious failure of the secure 
classes to justify their favourable handicap in life 
by producing either a high average of intelligence 
or a consistent standard of social goodwill. The 
first he spoke of as a ^* cleavage between the gen- 
erations" that divorces the thought and will of 
the young from that of their elders, and makes 
each of an endless number of families a house di- 
vided against itself. Going back to the genesis 
of each family unit, he said that people generally 
marry with some ideal, however inarticulate, in 
their minds — some dim notion that they are start- 
ing a vital chain of events springing from the 
glow of high emotion that, for all its human uni- 
versality, is so uniquely and wonderfully their 
very own. The coming of children extends and 
intensifies the feeling. People when they have 
young children, for whom they desire all that is 
best in life, have an impulse towards the truest 
human values. They want to live finely, to create 
a free, joyous atmosphere in which the young 
lives may grow up. This may be no more than 



150 W. E. FORD 

a vague instinct, but it is one of the deeply rooted 
instincts that have come through long evolution, 
and it uniquely expresses an essential aspect of 
the human spirit's urge towards perfection. The 
next step for the family unit and, Ford main- 
tained, a step without which there can be no true 
realisation of this high impulse, is to attain con- 
scious expression of its ideal through interaction 
between the minds, the wills, and the characters 
of parents and children. Only by a continually 
growing reciprocity could the unit become inte- 
grated, a thing of meaning and purpose, a true 
centre of radiation. And just as children reach 
the age when conscious reciprocity begins to be 
possible, they are uprooted and sent aw^ay for 
transplantation into the artificial soil of a board- 
ing-school community. At the best they keep a 
few roots still alive for brief, periodical retrans- 
plantation in the home soil ; for the most part the 
distinctively home-seeking roots shrivel and be- 
come atrophied. Children home for the holidays 
are usually visitors, not vital intimates, in a home 
that is itself quickly becoming atrophied because 
in losing its young life it has lost its raison 
d'etre.'^ The older generation stiffens, in thought 
and impulse, more than the advance of physical 
age would warrant; the new pursues its own 
paths, unaided by experience that has missed its 
natural season of mellowness ; and when the new 

' ^ Ford did not use an ar^ment which experience seems to con- 
firm — that when there are younger children still at home, the elder 
brother or sister home for the holidays displays a far less im- 
penetrable coating of school-imposed reserve. 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 151 

generation comes to the founding of its own 
homes, in the same rosy light of hope and expec- 
tation that inspired its predecessor, there is no 
conscious home-ideal for the foundation, no body 
of remembered knowledge and understanding of 
home life upon which to base the new venture. 
Ford saw in this round of causation quite half 
the reason (the muddle of our social economics 
providing the other half) for the total incompe- 
tence of many homes to give children any up- 
bringing worth the name. The whole business, 
he said, had got into such a vicious circle that 
there was little wonder if a few upper-middle- 
class theorists had begun to condemn the institu- 
tion of the home root and branch. 

The second educational brake was in a way the 
reflex of the first. People among whom the arti- 
ficial cleavage between the generations had be- 
come a matter of custom and acceptance for lack 
of any other vision, whose power to give a home 
education to their children had become paralysed 
by the operation of the vicious circle, naturally 
regarded teachers and schools — and even nurses 
and nursery governesses — as a means for getting 
rid of a responsibility that they were impotent to 
fulfil. It was as entirely right that the teacher 
should be called in to supplement the parental 
function as that the bootmaker should be called 
in to carry out the parental wish that children 
should have boots; but the trouble was that the 
parent tended to delegate the whole responsibility 
to the teacher, and so to the teaching profession, 



152 W. E. FORD 

which proceeded inevitably to evolve a stiff and 
cramping professional code of training — even as 
the bootmaking profession, uncontrolled by pa- 
rental enlightenment, provided stiff and heavy 
boots that mined children's feet, and the poise 
and grace of their movements.^ Such was always 
the way with professions not kept in touch with 
intelligent expression of the needs that they ex- 
isted to supply. The professional educator might 
complain of the commercial parent who demanded 
— almost the only parental demand crude and sim- 
ple enough to become articulate, as things are — 
a business training rather than general culture 
for his son; but the professional educator himself 
was already providing far less of general culture 
than of another and an unwanted business train- 
ing — a training in the business of passing exami- 
nations, of ^ ^ qualifying, ' ' if for anything beyond, 
for nothing better than a mere trade in scholar- 
ships, including the trade of schoolmastering for 
the next generation upon the same lines. This 
was another vicious circle, from which true cul- 
ture and scholarship had always to break away 
at a tangent, in virtue of the enthusiasm or the 
intellectual honesty of individuals, always in op- 
position and sometimes in painful opposition to 
the constraint of the system. 

Nothing better could be expected ; again a lack 
of reciprocity was at the root of the trouble — reci- 

^The more general spread among doctors of a knowledge of 
orthopaedics had begun by now to induce something approaching 
''parental enlightenment" in this respect. The "good strong 
school boot" was always one of Ford's bugbears. 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 153 

procity between educator and parent, between 
school and home. Homes that lost touch with 
their children, and so failed to fulfil their function 
as homes, could not aifect the artificial and far 
more technical machinery of schools ; parents who 
did not know their children's natures could not 
explain to their servants the schoolmasters what 
they wanted to have done with those natures. All 
that they could do was to let the business side, 
and then exercise the human prerogative of grum- 
bling- at the result. 

Ford was far from believing that by setting up 
a day school in Holland Road, he could demon- 
strate in action the ideal reciprocity between 
parent and teacher. Having analysed for us his 
view of the problem up to this point, he told his 
patron very definitely that he expected to achieve 
little in the way of parental co-operation. (Mr. 
Wishart had by now entirely agreed to the day- 
school plan.) The average parent would simply 
lack the impulse; and without the impulse. Ford 
declared, little could be done. He could only 
leave the channels open, welcome every inquiry 
and every sign of interest on the part of any 
parent, and take every opportunity of talking 
over some small co-ordination of school and home 
methods. But there would be a much greater 
chance of unconscious reciprocity through the 
children themselves. Ford launched into one of 
his electrical analogies. As hanging pithballs 
dart to and fro between two surfaces that carry 
different electrical charges, bearing each its small 



154 W. E. FORD 

charge across the intervening gap, gradually 
equalising the potential between the two, so the 
children would carry ideas from school to home 
and from home back to school, and thus home and 
school would react upon one another unconscious- 
ly and inevitably, in so far as there was vitality 
in either. 

^ ^You're an insatiable man,'* said Mr. Wishart 
drily, and turned to me to explain: *^He's for 
educating the parents too — that's all about it.'' 

Ford admitted the accusation cheerfully, say- 
ing that no education was of much value that had 
not that effect. Every new generation was an 
Aeneas that had to carry the old along or to leave 
it helpless behind. 

Miss Wishart, who had been listening to the 
discussion in silence, remarked that at any rate 
she was glad that the school was not to be a 
boarding-school. A boarding-school, she said, 
was just an artificial orphanage. Ford had at this 
time a shyness, a certain tender diffidence, in di- 
rect talk with her, and said nothing, but he flashed 
a quick glance of appreciation for the felicitous 
simplicity of this brief formula for his thesis. 

These preliminary discussions were concerned, 
for the most part, with questions of organisation 
and method that will find their place when I come 
to write of the school in being. Miss Wishart, 
when she was present, spoke little, and generally 
with the effect of putting some carefully elabo- 
rated theory of Ford's under the test of its sim- 
plest human application, as though she had been 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 155 

afraid of being carried away by bis power of 
statement and tbe force of bis conviction. Tbere 
was an occasion, during tbe time in wbicb tbe first 
broad lines of tbe scbeme were being laid down, 
wben Ford confessed to a strong leaning towards 
co-education. He bad been reading many argu- 
ments, be said, botb for and against tbe idea of 
teacbing boys and girls togetber, and bad been 
quite unable to make out bow all tbe trouble arose 
over a very simple matter. Tbe plan of sbepberd- 
ing cbildren into separate sex-berds was, and al- 
ways bad been as far as bistorj^ recorded, tbe 
symptom of an unbealtby standard in regard to 
sex. It was obviously tbe normal and natural 
tbing tbat boys and girls sbould be brougbt up 
in association witb one anotber; as tbings were, 
tliey grew up in an ignorance of eacb otber's ways 
and tbougbts, of wbicb tbe results were always 
tiresome and often tragic; segregation was tbe 
oddity, an oddity tbat a few civilisations, includ- 
ing our own, bad learned to take for granted. In 
tbe same way tbe Mabomedan world bad learned 
to take for granted tbe entire segregation of 
women, an equally absurd and convenient simpli- 
fication of a vital problem. Tbe only practical 
question was tbis: Had our standards, actually, 
fallen so low tbat tbe bealtbiness of cbildbood 
could not be trusted to put tbe fact of sex in its 
proper place? Or was it only tbat our native 
carelessness bad allowed a monastic precedent to 
become indurated and to gatber accretions of cus- 
tom and dignity till it took on tbe airs of a natural 



156 W. E. FORD 

law! Ford inclined to the latter view. In so far 
as fear of the sex motive in children came in to 
support the custom of segregation, it must be a 
chimerical fear, rooted in the upside-down argu- 
ment — or the bare, unargued supposition — that 
because sex was a potentially dangerous power, 
therefore the sexes had better be trained as for- 
eigners to one another. ' ' You might just as well 
say, ' ' Ford illustrated, ' ' if you found that grown- 
up Bengalis and Hindus had a way of flying at 
one another's throats when they met, that there- 
fore Hindu and Bengali children ought always to 
be educated in separate schools.'' 

Mr. Wishart, like the majority of Scots people, 
had no instinctive prejudice against co-education, 
but he questioned the fitness of this racial anal- 
ogy. In the case of the hypothetical Indian diffi- 
culty, he said, it would be a question of getting 
the children to like instead of hating one another ; 
in the case of boys and girls the whole supposed 
danger was of their liking one another too much. 
But Ford maintained that ^ diking" was exactly 
what had to be learned in both cases. The more 
girls and boys could find their reciprocity in lik- 
ing one another, the less they would bother them- 
selves with premature and imitative experiments 
in loving. And the sweeping, uncontrollable pas- 
sion, he said, that gets people into trouble later 
on, was considerably more akin to hatred than to 
liking. 

He turned to Miss Wishart, who had been play- 
ing Brahms to us after lunch before the talk had 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 157 

begun, to compare liking to the technique of mu- 
sic, and passion to its inspiration. When you 
know at sight how to finger and phrase a passage, 
the inspiration of music flows through you in pure 
joy; the less you are at home with your instru- 
ment, the more the inspiration worries and tears 
at you, and the more you plunge into mistakes — 
crashing discords that you hate yourself for hav- 
ing produced the moment you hear them. 

^'You're wanting a kind of school of love, Mr. 
Ford, ' * Miss Wishart commented. That, she went 
on to imply, seemed to be going a long way. 

* ^ A grounding in the elements, ' ' Ford laughed, 
and began to speak of the many-sided mutuality 
of interests that could and ought to grow up be- 
tween girls and boys if romantic love, when it 
came in due course, was to find true and happy 
expression. 

Mr. Wishart was not so sure about Ford's ^^due 
course.'' Would not Nature, in the guise of Ro- 
mance, assert itself too soon! Was it not saner 
and safer to keep young people's sex on one side 
till its time had come? 

Very likely it would be. Ford agreed, if it could 
be done ; but he himself would as soon undertake 
to put babies' heads on one side till they were 
ready to think with them. Developing sex was 
the inevitable companion of adolescence in any 
case; the only question was how its development 
would proceed most naturally and unconsciously. 
He had no experience, of course; but his instinct 
was that free association over all the correlative 



158 W. E. FORD 

interests of young life was the natural way. ' ' ^ 
Mr. Wishart was inclined to agree with the in- 
stinct, hut to go cautiously in the matter of its 
immediate application to practice. If Ford was 
right, he said, we had to consider people who had 
got themselves into another of Ford's vicious cir- 
cles. ''At this rate, it's not surprising if civilisa- 
tion's a hity dizzy," he remarked, parenthetically. 
If hoys and girls ought to he educated so as to 
develop their main interests in common, then 
parents who had not heen so educated themselves 
would be very slow to realise the fact. Most peo- 
ple were naturally and perhaps mercifully blind 
to chances of development that they had lost 
through deficiencies in their mode of education. 
And there was prejudice to be considered — the 
habit that Ford had mentioned of taking separate 
education for granted. He suggested that Ford 
should feel his own feet in the matter by degrees, 
and at the same time avoid alienating the ordinary 
parent (''it's those that we have to get," he said. 
"No school is going to live on the enlightened 
ones alone") — ^by starting with a boy's school that 
admitted girls to its youngest class. No one could 
object nowadays, with boy-and-girl kindergartens 
everywhere for precedent; and then there would 
be no reason why boys and girls should not go 
on together to the next class in the usual course ; 
and if the experiment seemed a success they could 

^ My own experiences of co-educational and of separate schools, 
and what I know of the experience of others, have convinced me 
that in actual fact sex-consciousness appears far more readily 
among boys or girls who are herded apart. 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 159 

let co-education spread upwards through the 
school. You could reform anything, Mr. Wishart 
contended, as soon as you could discover a method 
of reforming it gradually. 

Ford, with his inveterate habit of referring ev- 
erything to fundamentals, owed a great deal to 
the Scottish practicality that went hand in hand 
with Mr. Wishart 's idealism. Ford could be prac- 
tical enough when he was faced with practical de- 
tail, as was to be shown by his work as a head- 
master; but in tracing the main lines of a pro- 
ject, as in these preliminary discussions, he tend- 
ed to broaden every issue beyond the practical 
field. In part it was the natural bias of his essen- 
tially philosophical mind; in part, also, he knew 
that Mr. Wishart (and, I will dare to say. Miss 
Wishart as well) liked to see the gates of a sub- 
ject thrown wide, and that he could rely upon 
them to draw the light of his generalisations into 
focus upon the practical issue. 

Upon one practical point Ford was firm in ap- 
plying his philosophical theory of reciprocity. He 
insisted that the school must pay its way or go 
under. Mr. Wishart had planned at first for a 
capital outlay to start the undertaking, with an 
allowance of income to cover rent and certain 
other fixed expenses, and a reserve in case of 
emergencies. Ford would hear of nothing but the 
initial outlay. Once the school was established, 
he said, his business would be to try to make it 
indispensable for at least as many parents as 
would suffice to keep it going. In any of the lib- 



160 W. E. FORD 

era! professions financial reward for the work 
given was a crude and nnsatisfactory symbol of 
reciprocity between the worker and the worked- 
for, but it was the symbol that found gen- 
eral acceptance. What people would not at pres- 
ent pay for (he restated Ruskin's dictum, with a 
difference) they ought not at present to have. 
The work of the school, to carry the moral sup- 
port of the parents, must rest upon their finan- 
cial support; one can only carry people along by 
starting from where they are, not from where one 
would like them to be, and, roughly, the point 
from which they are prepared to start is the point 
at which they are ready to pay the fare. A pri- 
vate subsidy, he was sure, would only tempt him 
to drift out of the necessary reciprocal touch witli 
the parents by giving, for his own satisfaction, 
more than they could understand or appreciate. 

*^But isn't there something rather fine,'' Miss 
Wishart put in, * * about giving people bread when 
they ask for a stone?" 

**Yes — ^bread," said Ford. **But not jam as 
well — ^not till they have learned to digest and to 
demand the bread." 



CHAPTER VIII 

A VISITOR to Ford 's school was always impressed, 
favourably or otherwise, by its unpreteiitiousness. 
Notliing was on show; nothing expressed insist- 
ence upon the scholastic atmosphere. The house 
in Holland Road gave the impression of being a 
house before it was a school-house; the rooms 
were rooms first and class-rooms second. The 
little community was a household first and fore- 
most, and then a household specialised, but spe- 
cialised as quietly and unobtrusively as possible, 
for the business of teaching. 

Ford recognised that his refusal to let desks 
drive out tables and chairs, or maps oust pictures 
from the walls, made the place look amateurish in 
the eyes of many parents, even as his system of 
teaching seemed casual and discursive to any one 
who did not trouble to realise the broad and sys- 
tematic plans upon which it was based. His views 
upon desks and wall-maps were of a piece with 
his view of education in general. I remember his 
explaining these views to a conscientious mother 
who had made something of a study of modern 
class-room apparatus, and was as much scandal- 
ised to see a class sitting on chairs and working 
at tables as if she had seen the children encour- 
aged to eat Irish stew with their fingers. Desks, 

161 



162 W. E. FORD 

he said, cramped a cliild into one position. If 
the desk could be, and was, adjusted to the child's 
measurements with scientific accuracy, the one 
position that was allowed for was a right one; 
if not, it was a wrong one. But no child could 
stay in one position, right or wrong, for more 
than a minute, and the ideal one-position desk re- 
quired an ideal one-position child not yet invent- 
ed. With a table and a chair any number of 
slight changes of position were possible, and a 
child could be taught, as he ought to be taught, 
what positions were not good for his bodily well- 
being, and for what reasons. 

Ford's attitude towards this detail of physical 
education typifies his treatment of mental and 
moral education. He disliked harness and blink- 
ers for children, believing rather in giving them 
the opportunity and the means for self -guidance. 
To his mind, rigid rules of work and of behaviour 
were as useless — and as ugly — as rigid desks. 
Other educators have had the same idea, but have 
substituted slackness for rule. Ford was among 
the more thoughtful ones who have realised that 
there is no freedom without self-rule; and that 
self-rule has to be taught. 

His objection to wall-maps as a permanent 
school-room decoration was precisely the reason 
for which many teachers like to keep them hung 
up: that they help children to fix the shape of 
countries in their minds unconsciously and auto- 
matically. Ford considered that a map lies to a 
child who merely stares at it : it leads him to think 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 163 

of countries in terms of flat space only, as abstrac- 
tions without reality. He wanted to teach what 
a country is and what happens in it before bring- 
ing in an abstract diagram of its shape; and to 
lead up to keen and intelligent map-reading he 
wanted to teach how lands are explored and sur- 
veyed, as well as how they have been formed by 
Nature. 

I am tempted to go on and explain how he 
linked up stories of exploration with histor>^ 
teaching, surveying with geometry, and physical 
geography both with world-history and with nat- 
ural science; Ford's educational system had all 
its parts so closely inter-connected that I cannot 
touch it at a single point — like this point of the 
absence of wall-maps — without being dra^Ti into 
a consideration of the whole. To look under the 
surface of his method was to see the natural con- 
nections between diverse ideas spreading and link- 
ing up in every direction. This was why his 
pupils remembered what they were taught. They 
had ever}i:hing else to remember it by. But this 
was also why his scheme appeared unsystematic 
to people accustomed to keep ideas in watertight 
compartments, and to bring out only one at a 
time. The visitor looked for \dsible scholastic ma- 
chinery; and there was none to be seen. The in- 
visible mechanism was the type of mental life by 
which the school subsisted. 

Mr. Wishart, while fully appreciative of Ford's 
ideal, was concerned from a business point of 
view at his disregard for visible evidence of the 



164 W. E. FORD 

nature of the schooPs work. Ford, he said, was 
hiding his light under a bushel. It seems to me, 
in retrospect, that the school might have become 
famous, instead of being appreciated only by an 
enthusiastic few, if a way could have been found 
to show more tangible results of what was being 
done. But no one was inventive enough to sug- 
gest exhibits which, while genuinely representing 
the work of a class, would be obvious and strik- 
ing enough to impress a visitor ignorant of edu- 
cational method. Only Ford could have done this, 
and Ford had no wish to do anything of the kind. 
He said that he wanted our classes to do their 
work for its own sake, not in order to impress 
stupid people. I think he was glad, at the back 
of his mind, to keep off the kind of parent who is 
always wanting to *^see results*' — to pull the 
plant up and see how it is growing. His idea of 
a partnership between school and home in the up- 
bringing of a child demanded parents who would 
enter into the school's interests without having 
the school turned into a show. Certainly the un- 
derstanding that existed from the first, and grew 
fuller as time went on, between the school and 
the keenest of the parents, was a unique and an 
excellent thing ; but many of the parents dropped 
the attempt to understand Ford's work at a very 
early stage. It is one thing to teach children to 
think; it is quite another to induce thought in 
grown-up people who have firmly established in 
themselves the habit of avoiding thought. Ford's 
system, as it was, was suited to an aristocracy of 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 165 

thoughtful and responsible parents. To have 
made it democratic he would have had to make 
concessions — to lower the thought of the school, 
in some degree, towards the level of thought pre- 
vailing in the average home. And Ford would 
never hear of the *^ democratic'' view that neces- 
sitates levelling down. 

The Wisharts had many friends in London 
whose interest was easily engaged in a scheme 
for an ideal education. Some of these sent their 
children to the school, several from a considerable 
distance ; others, in turn, interested their friends, 
passing on Ford's prospectus and syllabus — a 
closely-written digest of his scheme of teaching 
which was an educational eye-opener for those 
who troubled to read it. The nucleus of the 
school's clientele — eight families, sending ten 
children, if I remember rightly — ^was of Mr. and 
Miss Wishart's forming. Seven more children, 
our seven youngest, came from the immediate 
neighbourhood, where a printed announcement of 
the school's inception had been circulated by post. 
Although we had had hopes of starting upon a 
larger scale than this, Ford was not ill satisfied 
with a total of seventeen children for the first 
term. We shared the teaching with a Swiss lady, 
Mme. Ajidree, who had done much work at Neu- 
chatel in the educational tradition of Pestalozzi 
and Froebel; besides teaching the small kinder- 
garten class exceedingly well, she held the office 
of matron, and came into daily collision, over ev- 



166 W. E. FORD 

ery conceivable matter of opinion, with the moth- 
ers or nurses who convoyed the children to and 
from the school. Ford, called in as arbitrator 
in many of these disputes, had his powers of di- 
plomacy severely tested. In addition I, as a nov- 
ice in the art of teaching, was dependent upon 
his direction at every turn. Perhaps it was as 
well that he had not larger numbers to cope with 
in first encountering the realities of headmaster- 
ship — though a small community is in some ways 
more difficult to govern than a large one. 

At any rate, the parents of a small school show 
little compunction in taking up the headmaster's 
time, and Ford had plenty of opportunity to 
gauge the main difficulty in establishing a part- 
nership between school and home. There was a 
local materfamilias, well endowed with that ma- 
jestic something which is called a presence, whom 
I will call Mrs. A. Besides a presence, she had 
the voice and articulation of one whose mind is 
made up on all points, and her statements to Ford 
were for all the world to hear. 

She began by expressing the hope that he had 
a strong personality. A strong personality, she 
assured him, was essential for a schoolmaster. 
Ford said that he hoped to develop some signs of 
personality in the children. *^ Children have no 
personality," said Mrs. A. (I was thankful that 
Mme. Andree was not present to pour a torrent 
of wrath upon this flat negation of Froebel's chief 
principle.) Ford suggested that perhaps it was 
the fault of their upbringing if they had not. But 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 167 

Mrs. A. had disposed of that subject, and now 
wished to let Ford know that her boy, then aged 
six, would in time have to make his own way in 
the world. Ford remarked that if the child were 
learning to think during the next few years he 
would be doing as well for his future career as 
possible. 

*^ There's altogether too much thinking,'' said 
Mrs. A. (whom I hope my memory reports with 
fair accuracy — nothing but direct statement can 
suggest the decision of her pronouncement). 
^*When it's a question of a scholarship or a place 
in some business, the thing will be, What does he 
know?" Having thus settled that point, she told 
Ford that the boy had enough play at home, and 
that she expected him to work at school; that he 
was very naughty at home, and was being sent to 
school to learn discipline ; and that he was one of 
those children that can be led, but cannot be 
driven. 

Mrs. A. proved quite immune to Ford's idea of 
parental co-operation, but she became a staunch 
supporter of the school as she noted the results 
in her own boy's case of a method of teaching 
which she consistently fought at each successive 
point. But having issued her instructions she 
paid little more attention to Ford that term, pre- 
ferring a good honest nose-to-nose argument with 
Mme. Andree over every detail of Froebel's sys- 
tem of educative play. Both ladies said their 
say, often simultaneously, and were satisfied ; and 



168 W. E. FORD 

meanwhile the education of Jack A. proceeded, to 
their equal contentment. 

As representing another type of parent equally 
inaccessible to Ford's co-operation ideal, I have 
a fairly distinct recollection of a mother who may 
be called Mrs. B. She stood in awe of Ford from 
the first, overpowered by her recognition of some- 
thing in him which she inadequately described as 
his ^^ cleverness.'' She came to me as to a less lu- 
minous body — shining with the milder, reflected 
light — and said that she was sure Mr. Ford was 
a wonderfully clever teacher, but that she did 
hope he had a strong personality. (The opening 
was already familiar to me; it is one of the two 
principal remarks by which the teaching profes- 
sion recognises the inept parent.) She was afraid 
that her little boy had rather a weak nature. He 
was so easily led into mischief by older children. 
(Charlie B. proved to be an original-minded 
young monkey who never joined a group, whether 
for good or for mischievous fun, without leading 
it.) He needed, she said, a strong hand over him, 
to influence him in the right direction. I had 
sufficiently absorbed Ford's principles to offer a 
tentative suggestion that perhaps the child need- 
ed to be taught how to keep a controlling hand 
upon himself. Mrs. B. feared that he was of too 
weak a nature ever to learn this. She placed 
implicit confidence in Mr. Ford. If only his per- 
.sonality was strong enough to overcome the weak- 
ness of her boy's character. . . . She broke off, 
leaving me to imagine what the intensity of her 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 169 

gratitude would be. But she recovered herself to 
add that Charlie was one of those children who 
can be led but cannot be driven. 

When I reported my interview with Mrs. B. to 
Ford, he said at once that he had little hope of 
her from the co-operative point of view. She was 
the kind of person, he said, who offers nothing 
— not even what there is to offers — and quietly, 
humbly, expects everything. None the less, Mrs. 
B. proved a ^^good" parent, from the schooPs 
point of view. She at least sent us her two young- 
er children as soon as each was old enough. But 
she never knew what was done with them. Her 
enthusiasm for Ford^s scheme rested upon a blind 
devotion. 

I remember Ford alluding, two or three times 
in the course of that first term, to the two catch 
phrases that ring so inevitably upon a teacher's 
ear. ^^ These people have got hold of the right 
end of the stick at last, ' ' he once said. * ' No child 
can be driven, effectually; leading is the only 
way.'' But they got no further, as he put it on 
another occasion, than the very tip of the stick's 
right end. They would make it out that the stick 
itself was the good old-fashioned ^^rod" of our 
forefathers in a new incarnation — that for coer- 
cion by beating we could only substitute coercion 
by a mysterious thing called personality, in its 
essence a kind of hypnotism. This, Ford main- 
tained, was a step downward, not upward, from 
the *^rod." The dominance of the thick stick at 
least left a child free to rebel in secret ; the dom- 



170 W. E. FORD 

inance of a personality invaded even the secret 
recesses of Ms soul, and left him no freedom at 
all. ^^TheyVe got the right end of the wrong 
stick, in fact," he concluded. Leading, not driv- 
ing, was the right way for education ; but it must 
not be a leading of the blindfolded. It would give 
a better idea of the teacher's business, Ford 
thought, to say not that he has to lead the way, 
but that he has to point the way. Children have 
to be taught to see clearly what the pointing fin- 
ger indicates ; but to reach the spot indicated they 
must not be led there in blindness, but encouraged 
to see and feel their way to it, and to strengthen 
their mental and spiritual sinews by a struggle 
of their own to climb to the ideal that has been 
made clear to them. 

**Only we've got to be jolly sure," Ford added, 
^Hhat we don't point to anything quite out of 
their reach. Then they fall backwards and get 
disheartened. ' ' 

The seventeen children were taught in two 
classes, of which the higher was subdivided again 
for certain subjects. Their ages ranged from six 
to twelve; a few boys of thirteen and fourteen 
would have been sent to us, but Ford had decided 
to take none over twelve to begin with, intending 
to build up the middle and upper forms of the 
school chiefly of those who should rise, properly 
grounded in the elements of his system, from the 
lower. It was not only that he wanted to make 
sure in this way that a coherent sequence of meth- 
od should eventually run through the school; he 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 171 

also hoped for the support of parents who would 
have seen the point of his method in the earlier 
stages, and would realise that he knew what he 
Avas about when it came to the later stages. 

The kindergarten opened as a little group of 
four boys and three girls, all in their sixth or 
seventh year; new arrivals, dropping in casually 
during the term, increased the number to a dozen. 
Here Mme. Andree taught with the practised pa- 
tience and suavity which she reserved for her 
dealings with children, clamouring to Ford every 
now and again for the apparatus prescribed by 
the Froebel Society. Ford, who always held that 
no teacher should be more dependent upon ready- 
made apparatus than was absolutely necessary, 
encouraged her to invent, and to get her children 
to invent, every kind of home-made substitute for 
the Froebel *^ gifts," thus logically carrying on 
FroebePs own principle of drawing out the origi- 
native activity of children. 

He took the kindergarten himself for a daily 
lesson known as '^Questions," which consisted 
nominally in his explaining in turn as many prob- 
lems as the children had time to propound to him, 
but really in his showing them how to hunt down 
the answers for themselves with as little help 
as possible. He always allowed three questions 
from the same child upon the same subject, pro- 
vided they could be put in the form of What I 
How? and Why?— in that order. What, Jack A. 
would ask, were the men doing in the road out- 
side ? Evidence was forthcoming from the differ- 



172 W. E. FORD 

ent observations of the children who had watched 
them : they were laying gas-pipes ; and there fol- 
lowed attempts on the children's part to explain 
what coal-gas is. (Ford, of course, gave no sci- 
entific explanation at this stage — that wonld come 
years later — but only encouraged description and 
definition of what the children had observed.) 
Next, how was gas made? Jack A. had to rest 
content, in the present stage of his understand- 
ing, with an elementary and partial examination 
of this query; but more could be said about the 
way in which gas is distributed to houses. There 
was a pause : the questioner did not want to waste 
the last of his three opportunities to lead the 
quest. Then — '^Why can't you see the gas when 
it isn't alight r' 

Ford lit a cigarette (not, by the way, his usual 
practice in school hours), and blowing a puff of 
smoke round the gas-jet, turned it on. *^You can, 
now," he said, as the escaping gas swept the 
smoke upwards. ** Can't you?" The class as- 
sented, all but Jack, who was keen to push his 
question home. *^No, you can't — you only see the 
smoke go up!" he said, and blushed with pride 
when Ford told him that he was quite right — 
and that he would not be able to understand why 
you can see through some things, and cannot see 
other things at all, until he had learned a great 
deal more about the what and the how of things. 

This elementary foundation-laying for an or- 
derly habit of thought was by no means directed 
towards satisfying the young and inquiring mind 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 173 

upon all points ; its immediate lesson was, rather, 
that there is only a partial answer to most ques- 
tions, and that the completer answer needs more 
knowledge and more practice in thinking. Visi- 
tors who came in to hear Ford give a lesson often 
thought him ^ inconclusive, ^ ' when his aim was 
to make children begin to realise that all knowl- 
edge is inconclusive, and would lose its eternal 
attraction if it were not. His later work with 
older children always had the same quality, and 
gave the same sense that the class was a single 
organism reaching out, grasping and holding 
what it was able to grasp, but always with an 
eager eye upon something beyond, not yet grasped, 
but presently to be seized upon and made a hand- 
hold in the further climb among the mountain 
ridge of knowledge. 

No marks or prizes were given in Ford's school. 
They would have seemed irrelevant. Eegarded as 
concrete recognition of a child's advance, they 
would have meant little to children who thought 
less of the small things that they had done than 
of the splendid things that they wanted to do; 
regarded as a stimulus to competition they would 
have meant nothing to children who never thought 
about beating each other, but only about beating 
themselves. 

Among the ten children, that first term, who 
were above the kindergarten age — our Form I., 
divided for the two more formal subjects of gram- 
mar and mathematics into Forms la and lb — 
there was no idea of precedence from the start. 



174 W. E. FORD 

la gave itself no airs because it knew an intransi- 
tive from a copulative verb or could solve a prob- 
lem in simple proportion; somebody in Ih was 
always likely to redress the balance when the two 
divisions united into a homogeneous Form I. for 
history or composition. The essence of the mat- 
ter is that Ford studied to bring out the some- 
thing unique and irreplaceable that exists in ev- 
ery individual child. His children learned to re- 
spect this something in one another; and they 
learned self-respect by the same process. 

This is a biography of Ford, not a treatise up- 
on his educational method, but a few notes upon 
that method are essential because his teaching 
was, at this period, by far the greater part of 
his life. The time-table of our little Form I. 
really gives the whole of his system in embryo. 
When Forms II., III., IV., and V. came into being 
as time went on, their time-tables were essentially 
the same, only the parts of Ford's system had 
budded and branched into an increasing diversity 
of connected ''subjects.'' The day began with a 
scripture lesson. Ford regarded the Bible as a 
history — the history of a people, viewed from the 
single standpoint of goodness. He taught that 
in the Bible you find everything tested by the 
question. Is it right? — a question often asked 
crudely and answered clumsily, but always insist- 
ently asked. As he taught it, the Bible was the 
story of the development of a sense of right. 
With this main line of thought he connected every 
kind of incident and illustration from history and 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 175 

from everyday life with which the children were 
familiar. He taught no creed, considering this to 
be the business of parents and priests; but he 
taught simply and clearly what is and has been 
believed by different people, and what good has 
come of their beliefs. Later, with older children, 
he explained other beliefs as well as those of the 
Bible. He did not so much ^Heach a religion" as 
bring out the connection of all religion with 
thought and life, and its influence for good or evil 
according as it is nobly or degradedly conceived. 
The next lesson on the morning list was gram- 
mar. Ford taught the structure of language as a 
single science, beginning with the structure of 
English, then comparing English with French, 
and connecting both, later on, with the more exact 
structure of Latin. He wasted no time in having 
the same laws of language taught separately and 
under different names as English, French, and 
Latin grammar; and as regards differences of 
structure between languages he avoided the end- 
less mistakes that children make through con- 
fusing the rules of one language with those of 
another by setting out these differences of rule 
parallel to one another, as it were, in the chil- 
dren's minds. He used no text-books, but taught 
children how to reconstruct the rules of grammar 
for themselves by analysing passages that had 
been read beforehand — often passages that had 
been read in other lessons. He made grammar 
interesting, first, because he used the fact that 
children always like to pick things to pieces and 



176 W. E. FORD 

see how they are made, and second, because he 
chose passages that were interesting or beautiful 
in themselves, and showed how their quality de- 
pended upon their structure. 

Mathematics he taught as one science from the 
first, and throughout the later development of the 
school. To teach arithmetic, geometry, and alge- 
bra in separate lessons was in his view as 
wasteful of time, and as misleading, as to teach 
the structures of different languages separately. 
And here again he continually drew material from 
other lessons. The ^^ made-up" problem — such as 
the useless ascertainment of the number of days 
in which A can do an unspecified piece of work — 
had no place in his teaching. Actual material for 
problem work was drawn from the facts and fig- 
ures of the geography and natural science les- 
sons and from doings in real life with which the 
children had some acquaintance ; and they learned 
to state their problems for themselves as well as 
to solve them. Problem work was his foundation 
for mathematical teaching ; practical mathematics 
came before theoretical. At any rate he was so 
far justified that his older pupils eventually 
showed greater keenness for pure mathematics, 
and better sense in the handling of theory, than 
is often found in the rank and file of advanced 
mathematical students. 

After the Swedish drill and mid-morning break 
•that came after the mathematical lesson, there fol- 
lowed a period devoted to history and geography. 
Ford did not merge the two subjects entirely into 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 177 

one, but he taught them in very close connection 
with one another. He thought it absurd to talk 
about the activities of man without constant rela- 
tion to the environment of man; and, since he 
taught the detailed history of individual nations 
only within a general framework of world-history, 
he naturally referred at every turn to that histori- 
cal geography which explains many of man's op- 
portunities and vicissitudes upon this planet. The 
aspect of geography which is really a branch of 
physical science he kept in connection with the 
work done in the science lessons ; the mathematics 
of geography, as we have seen, were carried for- 
ward to be worked out in the mathematical lesson. 
The biographical and literary sides of histoiy 
were connected with the lessons in literature and 
composition next to be noted. The aspects of 
history which relate to modern civics and polities 
came into touch with another lesson to be de- 
scribed later on. 

The literature and composition period — the last 
in the morning's time-table — was concerned pri- 
marily with the art of language, as the grammar 
period was primarily concerned with the science 
of language. Here the children studied models 
of language rightly and artistically used, English, 
French, and, at a later stage, Latin, and practised 
their immature style by endeavoring to summar- 
ise, restate or imitate the written word of masters 
in the literary craft. Ford chose his models both 
for their intrinsic literary value and for their 
relation to any of the other lessons that the 



178 W. E. FORD 

Form was learning at the time. The great his- 
torians, the great scientists, the great statesmen 
were called in evidence of his teachings in history, 
science or politics, as well as the great poets in 
prose or verse, the perfection of whose phrasing 
was later to be put under the grammatical micro- 
scope. The children's own compositions, how- 
ever, were not only in reproduction or imitation 
of models ; Ford cared more than anything to de- 
velop originality. But the original essays written 
in this lesson were usually written around mate- 
rial or ideas derived from other lessons : one essay 
would be about a character lately studied in his- 
tory, another upon the literary or poetic aspect 
of some fact of natural science, a third upon a 
problem of everyday life that had been brought 
out in the last lesson in civics. The literature les- 
son, more than any (unless it were the scripture 
lesson), brought all Ford's teaching into a com- 
mon, human focus. 

(I am necessarily straying far beyond the scope 
of our first term's work, and of the childish lim- 
itations of Form I., in this attempt at a crude 
summary of Ford's time-table. But there is 
scarcely a point of method that I have indicated 
— though the statement may seem surprising — 
which Ford did not apply during that first term, 
in simple and elementary ways, to the actual and 
effective teaching of Form I., a Form of ten and 
eleven-year olds. It was part of Ford's genius 
as a teacher to be able to present large schemes 
in embryonic shape, and to bring the germs of 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 179 

mature ideas into touch with immature minds.) 
The afternoon time-table varied more for the 
different days of the week. The first period, a 
comfortably lengthy one, was given on two days 
to natural science, largely experimental, on two 
to drawing and painting, and on two to hand- 
work of various kinds. On the two latter after- 
noons there were games — a field had been taken 
west of Shepherd's Bush. Ford was never a good 
player of games — he never had enough practice 
— ^but he was an excellent coach. On the other 
four days Form I. went on to French reading and 
conversation with Mme. Andree, while Ford took 
the kindergarten in '^Questions.'' There fol- 
lowed lessons in reading aloud, recitation or act- 
ing — incidents drawn from history or other 
studies being often dramatised by the children; 
and Miss Wishart came in to give a bi-weekly 
singing lesson with Ford's assistance. 

A volume might be written about Ford's teach- 
ing of science. The principal thing and the sim- 
plest thing to be said about it is that he 
taught science as a whole and as an outlook upon 
life.^ Form I. began with elementary nature 
study, connected with the arithmetic, geography, 
and drawing lessons — and to mention these con- 
nections is to make it clear that ^^ nature study," 

^ I have outlined an adaptation of the scheme, omitting many 
features that could not be adopted in most schools without a 
revolution in method, in an article entitled ''School Science: the 
Synthetic Method," Tvhich appeared in The Times Educational 
Supplement of 3rd December 1912, and was the subject of a leading 
article in The Times of the same date. 



180 W. E. FORD 

in Ford's hands, was not only the study of seed- 
lings and tadpoles. I will take a single instance 
from a time when Form II. had come into being, 
a few terms later on. The children's lessons in 
world-geography had reached a stage in which 
the formation of land and the wearing-down of 
rock into soil had been discussed, and different 
types of countryside and their vegetable products 
were being considered. Ford and I wrote to 
friends in different parts of England and obtained 
samples of different types of soil. These went 
to the laboratory, where the children of Form II., 
working in pairs, and each pair analysing one 
sample, proceeded to separate and weigh the con- 
stituents of the different soils — clay, sand, lime, 
organic matter, and so forth — and to note down 
in what quantity each constituent was present. 

The notes from this lesson were used as mate- 
rial for the next mathematical lesson. Form II. 
was then at work upon proportion and per- 
centages, and to work and table the percentage 
composition of the different soils was an appro- 
priate exercise. In the next science lesson the 
remainder of each sample was put into an earthen- 
ware pan, and each pan was sown with the same 
number of the same typical seeds ; thereafter, the 
pans of soil were given strictly equal treatment 
in the matter of moisture, warmth and light; the 
seedlings were then measured at intervals and 
drawn (of course in the drawing lesson) to show 
how each appeared to like its quarters. Finally, 
all the records and notes were brought together 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 181 

in a composition lesson, and the members of Form 
II. wrote up their account of the whole proceed- 
ing. 

This is a particularly plain and obvious example 
of Ford's method in teaching elementary science. 
Its defect as an instance is that it is too simple; 
most of the illustrations of his procedure that 
could be cited would give a much fuller idea of 
the meaning that science had for him and for 
those whom he taught. But to follow any of the 
threads that were more intricately woven into 
the fabric of his teaching, would be to make his 
teaching the sole theme for the remainder of this 
book; if I pull at any really important thread of 
thought in his educational system, it is to find that 
half a dozen other threads follow, and that these 
in turn are followed by a score of fresh filaments, 
all essential to the texture. If I were to touch, 
for further instance, upon his treatment of the 
much-laboured topic of flower-fertilisation as a 
study conducive to eugenic realisations, I should 
be compelled to disentangle at great length all the 
slight, fugitive, but carefully thought-out and in- 
terrelated tendencies in his teaching towards a 
rational outlook upon the subject of sex. Whether 
Ford was explaining, with careful frankness, some 
crude phrase in the Old Testament, or touching 
upon the moral of Greek and Roman decadence, 
or describing the pollination of flowers, he had an 
ultimate aim in mind ; towards this all his gradual 
allusions converged. He wanted to lead children 
towards a right and a natural understanding of 



182 W. E. FORD 

sex — ^not to a mere acquaintance, often dangerous 
by itself, with natural facts, but to an under- 
standing that would gradually put fact into its 
proper relation with feeling, and lead the later 
emotions of adolescence outward, not inward — 
into the world of ideals and of the creative imag- 
ination, not into the sensuous imaginings of con- 
strained, inward-looking youth. But this, though 
only a single point of Ford^s scientific method in 
its wider aspect, is one that concerns his educa- 
tional methodology rather than his biography. 

It is time to turn from Ford's system regarded 
as a training for the mind, and to speak of its 
relation to the training of will and character — 
not that the two aspects can be separated, except 
as a matter of convenience in description. It was 
an essential point in Ford's theory of education 
that all training is character-training, either good 
or bad, and that the teaching which isolates mind- 
training during any part of the school day is not 
merely neglecting the character during that time 
but actively spoiling it. This is not to say that he 
was continually harping upon morals. He be- 
lieved in leading children to seek the truth of 
things for its own sake — in developing their in- 
tellectual conscience; and he believed that this 
conscience is destroyed by any teaching that is 
merely a mental gymnastic and nothing more. 

I remember his stating this view to me in some 
such terms as these : It is part of our business in 
education to aim at making the world as we see it 
more like the world as we think it ought to be. 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 183 

There are two obvious defects in tlie world as we 
see it : ignorance, and nnreadiness to apply what 
knowledge there is. The remedy for the first is 
a wider spread of knowledge, and this is often 
thought to be the only province of education. But 
it is of no use to spread knowledge which mil only 
be vitiated by the second defect. People who know 
what to do and are not doing it have a sore spot 
in their under-consciousness — a region of funda- 
mental insincerity and uneasiness. 

Take the case of the slums, he said. We all 
know enough by now to have made sure that 
slums ought to be abolished, not only as a matter 
of human decency, but as a matter of social health 
and prosperity. But we don^t get it done. Ask 
any individual why this is, and the answer will 
be that we can't see how to set about it. But it 
is the will, not the way, that is really wanting — 
or rather the turning of the will into an effective 
channel. Every one cares about abolishing pov- 
erty except a minority of profiteering ruffians who 
care about nothing but making money; and even 
these have begun to see, from the purely commer- 
cial point of view, that the poverty and ill-health 
of employees is a drag upon business. The trou- 
ble is that we keep our knowledge and our 
pity and even our commercial wisdom in one 
pocket, and our will in another. We have never 
had any real practice in keeping our knowledge 
and our will in touch with one another. And when 
it comes to action — such as fixing a rate of wages, 
or running up a new block of tenements in Ber- 



184 W. E. FORD 

mondsey — sheer, blind inertia keeps up as close 
to the bad old way as possible. Both public opin- 
ion and the law are far ahead of our practice ; but 
sweating goes on, and surveyors are still squared 
to pass evasions of the building regulations. 

Ford's working out of this instance was typical 
of his method in two ways. He saw the direction 
of social evolution as depending, always, upon 
the direction in which the pressure of individual 
wills was turned. In the case of poverty and 
slum life, the pressure that kept them in exist- 
ence was blind. The more enlightened will — 
which exists all right, he maintained — was unable 
to function because it existed only in the air, and 
had never been taught its business ; and the blind, 
primitive will had its way. When this state of 
things was allowed to go on for long enough, 
revolution supervened in a healthy society, or 
decay in an unhealthy one. Revolution was the 
desperate cure for evolution that had taken a 
downward curve. The only other cure was to 
enable the enlightened will of man to exercise its 
natural upward pressure — to harness the balloon 
to the car, as Ford put it. Unharnessed, the 
most enlightened exponents of social theory were 
only drifting gas-bags. This idea of a detached 
and useless enlightenment was fundamental to 
Ford's explanation of our failure to live up to 
our ideals. 

This explanation was the first typical point in 
his treatment of the slum instance ; it related the 
particular problem to a wide general tendency. 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 185 

The second stage was to work out the particular 
means for dealing with the tendency. Ford was 
not one of the educators who think that education 
is the only reforming power in the world ; rather, 
he saw it as one mode of expression for the gen- 
eral will to reform; but the particular " harness '' 
by which he had chosen to contribute his own 
share of reforming pressure was the machinery 
of school-work, and he believed that that machin- 
ery could do something to make enlightened good- 
will more effectual in life than it usually is. The 
cry, ^'The evil that I would not, that I do," he 
declared to be the cry of the miseducated through 
the ages, most naturally voiced by Paul the con- 
vert to Christianity, who in his youth had been 
brought up a Pharisee. 

Ford was convinced that no teaching could be 
effectual for the future which did not enable a 
child to exert and to express his own will at every 
turn. All the great educational prophets, and 
Froebel the most notably of them all, have in- 
sisted upon the need of enlisting a child's will on 
behalf of learning; Ford, I believe, was the only 
practitioner in education who clearly worked out 
the further need of developing a child's will not 
only that he may learn the better, but in order 
that what he learns may have effect in his after 
life. This of course is an aim, an ideal, of all good 
educators; but I have heard of none but Ford 
whose method gave systematic expression to the 
aim. 

To begin with, he taught children, as do all good 



186 W. E. FORD 

teachers, to have a philosophy of their own ; he led 
them to think over and discuss the root principles 
of every topic that came up for consideration in 
school, so far as they could work them out. Even 
the kindergarten, in ^^ Questions, '* learned to for- 
mulate its simple little conclusions. He gave the 
fullest scope and help to the natural keenness of 
children to get as near to the absolute truth of 
everything as they can, and he encouraged both 
their will to discover truth and their ambition to 
excel themselves, by leading them to realise how 
partial and imperfect was the truth that they had 
so far discovered — and how infinitely wide a field 
still lay open, even before the wisest, for further 
discovery. But he did not stop at thus eliciting 
principles from fact. He never carried theory 
into the upper air of philosophy and left it there. 
He always brought the principle back to earth 
again and applied it to the facts and problems 
of everyday life. Thus, as his youngest pupils be- 
gan by learning to use the sequence of questions. 
What? — How! — Why! as the natural order of in- 
quiry when one is in pursuit of knowledge, so, as 
they grew older, they learned to use the sequence, 
Knowledge — Principle — Application. They were 
encouraged in their natural tendency to keep these 
three elements distinct and in their proper order : 
they had first to get at all the available facts and 
arrange them in true relation to one another; 
then, and only then, to begin talking about the 
principle governing the relations between the 
group of facts ; and lastly, to apply the principle 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 187 

to some practical problem — if possible, a problem 
concerning their own everyday life, and, if pos- 
sible, a problem which they could solve in action, 
not only in theory. 

Thus Ford aimed at building up a habit of 
mind through which will can function: the sound 
habit of a mind that, first, will not rest content 
till it has all the available facts marshalled and 
arranged without partiality ; second, \vill not look 
at the facts alone, but will insist upon looking 
through them to discover a principle: third, hav- 
ing found a principle, will not remain content 
with that satisfaction, but will be uneasy until it 
has found a right application for the principle. 

This is somewhat theoretical; let me give an 
example of the working of the plan in elementary 
school-room practice. I will choose one from my 
own work upon Ford's model, to show how far his 
plan was workable under a 'prentice hand. Form 
III. was considering the government of Greek 
city-states in the course of their study of elemen- 
tary world-history. (This was before a Fourth 
Form had come into being, and eighteen months 
or so after the school had started; the average 
age of Form III. was about thirteen.) We had 
collected the facts about Greek city-state govern- 
ment, chiefly from Mr. Warde Fowler's book on 
the subject, in relation to the small and manage- 
able numbers which the states had to deal with, to 
the Greek education and love of clear thinking, 
and to the fact that slavery was part of the Greek 



188 W. E. FORD 

social order. Then came the search for simple 
principles. 

Slavery, at any rate, was wrong ; that point had 
been worked out in an earlier history lesson. Bultj 
what of the comparatively humane slavery prac- 
tised by the Greeks I A child suggested that this 
was better than a cruel slavery, but not as good 
as freedom for everybody. Wasn't a humanely 
treated slave better off than a badly treated free- 
man? Some one gained kudos by observing that 
the masters could be just as slack whether the 
slaves were well treated or not. Slavery, in fact, 
led to ^^ slackness'' — almost the last word in child- 
ish condemnation — in any case, and slackness 
meant the deterioration of a people. Slavery was 
bad, but Greek slavery was not as bad as it might 
have been because other things were good. Greek 
education was good; every one thought it worth 
while to know things and to think about them, 
so every one could help a bit in thinking for the 
good of the city. But also every one could help 
because there were few enough people for any one 
to be heard who had something important to say. 
It was because of good education that other people 
would be ready to listen; but also there must be 
few enough of them for all to hear. The special 
principle seemed to be, then, that small groups of 
people could govern themselves better than big 
groups. Large nations — in those times at any 
rate — ^had to be governed from behind their backs 
by autocrats. This crude and simple conclusion 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 189 

was subtle enough for the children at that stage ; 
later on it would be carried further. 

Next came the search for an application. Do 
small groups govern themselves nowadays, in 
England? The first answer was No: we are all 
governed by Parliament. But weren^t there small 
groups within the nation! The children could 
know little as yet about our muddle-headed at- 
tempts at local self-government, but one sugges- 
tion was forthcoming: parishes. Was parish life 
much like city-state life? Not much, apparently. 
We arrived at the conclusion that the chief busi- 
ness of a parish was to look after the poor, and 
that it was a good plan for small groups of peo- 
ple to look after their own poor — the circum- 
stances would be better understood. But who pays 
attention to what the parish is doing? The chil- 
dren did not know, but they decided that every 
one ought to. 

At this moment an idea occurred to one of the 
children. The different things that were made in 
the handwork classes of the school were sold 
twice in the year — admiring parents, relations, 
and friends of the manufacturers were the buy- 
ers, but Ford saw to it that the goods were worth 
their price — for the benefit of Dr. Barnardo's 
Homes. Wouldn't it be better — this was the idea 
— if we paid some attention to the doings of our 
own parish by devoting the profits of the school 
sales of work to parochial charity? The rest of 
Form III. was somewhat scandalised. Dr. Bar- 
nardo's was regarded as a school institution; we 



190 W. E. FORD 

took pride in the occasional reports that were sent 
to us of the progress of waifs sent out to Canada 
through our munificence. What was mere paro- 
chialism compared with this ! Parochialism, how- 
ever, gained some ground in later discussion, after 
school; and at the next history lesson there was 
a brief question time before entering upon the 
main business of the House, and it was agreed 
that the problem of local as against centralised 
charity should be referred to Ford. 

Ford discussed the matter in all due solemnity 
with the members of Form III. and their history 
master, who together formed a deputation after 
morning school. He pointed out that the paro- 
chialists of Form III. were quite right — one ought 
to help in local affairs; but that the others were 
quite right too — one must not neglect the wider 
issues, in a big nation like this. He suggested 
that the school workshop should divide the income 
from its produce between Dr. Bamardo's and 
some local charity; and from that time forward 
this was the arrangement, to the mutual satisfac- 
tion of every one concerned. (Ford, I happen to 
know, not wishing Dr. Bamardo^s Homes to suf- 
fer by losing the half of a school subscription, 
made up the deficit himself, but of this the chil- 
dren in Form III. knew nothing.) 

This application, by the children themselves, of 
a principle drawn from facts long centuries dis- 
tant, was perhaps far-fetched ; it was only natural 
that it- should be. But it would be difficult to deny 
that in attempting, however childishly, to apply 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 191 

the principle of interest in local affairs to their 
own time and place, they gained a better realisa- 
tion of the human meaning of a city-state ; or that 
their potential value as English citizens was de- 
veloped by their childish effort to revalue the les- 
son of ancient Greece. It is easier to laugh at 
the solemnities of childish idealism than to train 
that idealism, in its natural, crude spontaneity, so 
that it may eventually bear fruit in the world of 
realities. But it is very greatly worth while to 
watch the early genesis of a child's impulse to- 
wards social goodwill, and to try to help a little 
in enabling the impulse to grow towards its ma- 
turer expression. 

Ford was equally keen on small beginnings in 
the details of character-training, and on small be- 
ginnings that should be positive, not negative. He 
believed that faults of character are both magni- 
fied and ingrained by perpetual '^don't's.'' Ly- 
ing, for instance, attains the dignity of a crime 
for many children; and since few people try to 
understand the psychology of a childish lie, often 
an inevitable reflex action due to the clumsiness 
of grown-up questioning, the criminal charge is 
often a thing of pure unreason to a child. The 
deliberate lie, on the other hand, often goes un- 
detected. Small wonder that many children come 
to regard lying as a game of chance! Ford al- 
ways explained to a child that any fool can tell a 
lie; it is the easy, unenterprising thing to do — 
mere ^^ slackness.'' The clever thing, he would 



19^ W. E. FORD 

point out, is to tell the truth so as to make oneself 
understood; any one can tell a lie so as to be be- 
lieved at the moment. 

But a child seldom lied to Ford. The defensive 
lie, perhaps the commonest agent in undermining 
the childish sense of truth, was hardly ever set 
up against him. While he encouraged children to 
try to make themselves understood, he did his part 
by being ready to understand. I remember his 
saying that a child lies in self-defence for two 
reasons : he has done something wrong, and knows 
it, and his civilised self, which has now recovered 
control, resents being identified with the more 
primitive self which committed the blunder ; also, 
there is allied to his revulsion from the wrong- 
doing self a sense of impending calamity — of 
grown-up reprobation all ready to overwhelm 
both his selves in a common retribution. In this 
distorted moment, the truth about the misde- 
meanor becomes the lever that, if touched, would 
let loose the flood; and fear of grown-up misun- 
derstanding makes the civilised self of the child 
cower down with his primitive self under the easy 
protection of a lie. The fear is not in its essence 
a fear of punishment, Ford insisted, though this 
is often linked with it ; it is a fear of opprobrium, 
largely blind and instinctive. Vestiges of the 
same vague, subconscious fear occasionally make 
grown-up people tell small purposeless lies with- 
out being aware of them until the words are 
spoken. 

A great part of Ford's secret as a successful 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 193 

trainer of character was that he had found out 
how to ally himself with the higher will of a child 
against the lower. In this particular case of the 
defensive lie, the child who came to Ford with 
some misdemeanor upon his conscience, knew that 
his more civilised self, already in revolt against 
the tyranny of the primitive criminal in him, 
would find a friend ready to help and explain. It 
was easy to tell the truth to Ford, because he 
would see it as the truth and as a thing to be rea- 
soned about, not as an abhorrent evil to be made 
a text for moral reprobation. The keynote of 
Ford's attitude towards the young misdemean- 
ant was always, ^' Let's see how we can put this 
right.'' The consequence of wrongdoing was not 
punishment, but an attempt at reparation, and 
though the reparation might be difficult, it was 
willingly undertaken when it was decreed by Ford. 
This was not the result of Ford's personal in- 
fluence — of his ^ ' strong personality, ' ' in the com- 
mon parental phrase — it w^as the result of his hav- 
ing taken trouble to study the .nature of children, 
and to gain their trust by gradual degrees through 
showing that he wanted to understand them, not 
to condemn. In the particular instance of defen- 
sive lying, he made the lie impossible, because he 
had developed a method to that end. He once 
gave me some hints on the subject. Above all 
things, he said, one must keep quiet and deliber- 
ate. Any sign of fuss or irritation raises the 
child's primitive fear of opprobrium. Go slowly: 
take time to think ; you will need it yourself, and 



194 W. E. FORD 

also the child needs the opportunity to think he- 
fore he speaks, so that he may not commit himself 
rashly to a sudden untruth. Also — ^here Ford was 
emphatic — ^look out for the signs that a hasty lie 
is coming: the drop of the eyes, the catch of the 
breath that tell of mistrust and of a sudden res- 
olution to risk the defensive fiction. That is the 
moment to interrupt and to talk quietly and rea- 
soningly. The actual utterance of the untruth 
must be warded otf : once it is uttered, pride will 
come in to prevent its withdrawal. 

At this point I asked whether the catch of the. 
breath might not equally indicate a sudden reso- 
lution on the child's part to tell the truth — to 
make a clean breast of it. Ford was illuminating 
— as he always was upon a matter of practical 
detail, no less than of general theory. ^' Watch 
his eyes,'' he said. If a child looks down at the 
outset, he is going to lie, though he may look up 
at you again, when the untruth is prepared, with 
an appearance of the most engaging simplicity. 
The child who is going to tell the truth looks up 
first, if only for a moment: he may gaze at his 
boots afterwards as he stammers out his halting 
explanations, but the one preliminary glance up- 
wards has declared his sincerity. I must say 
that I have never known this test to fail. 

To speak more generally of Ford's scheme of 
character-training, he believed strongly in mak- 
ing children conscious of the primitive barbarian 
that still lurks in civilised humanity, as well as of 
their higher nature that has to master the barbar- 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 195 

ian element. He believed that most moral train- 
ing is lopsided — it dwells upon ideals and rules 
of conduct without explaining to a child the dif- 
ficulties in his own nature that he will have to 
encounter in applying them. The natural, healthy 
barbarian in a child is usually treated upon 
the principle of letting sleeping dogs lie: though 
some outlet, merely physical as a rule, is allowed 
for the exercise of ^ ^ animal spirits, ' ' in order that 
these may remain temporarily quiescent in the 
times between. The fact that the ethics of prim- 
itive man — *^a scratching, yelling, grabbing, en- 
vying individualist, ' ' as Ford once described him 
— are only partially submerged in childhood, is 
a fact of human natural history which he refused 
to neglect in the training of character. The usual 
way, he said, is blindly to suppress the barbarian 
spirit — to express oneself, often quite insincerely, 
as shocked and horrified whenever it emerges, 
and hastily to push it under again by a show of 
moral indignation ; and this is as great a mistake 
as blindly to allow it free play. 

Ford drew from his own short experience as a 
schoolboy, as well as from his keen and intuitive 
observation of children, a truth which most of 
us can verify from our recollections of childhood, 
and perhaps in some degree from our adult expe- 
rience : that children, and in some vlegree grown- 
ups as well, have an uneasy sense at the back of 
their mind of being the most appalling moral hum- 
bugs in relation to the superior moral standards 
of those around them. This, Ford was sure, is 



196 W. E. FORD 

altogether a bad thing. It leads either to mor- 
bidities of conscience, the child regarding him- 
self as a hopeless sinner, or, in children of more 
robust nature, to the determined crushing-under 
of a conscience that has become so pessimistic a 
companion. In the one case the result is hyper- 
trophy, in the other atrophy, of conscience. 

His method of avoiding both evils was to teach 
the facts of our mixed inheritance, in connection 
both with world-history and with simple evolu- 
tionary science. These are big words when one 
thinks of small children, but Ford proved that 
the teaching could be effectual through the stor- 
ies of human and animal life that were the small 
beginnings for a knowledge of history and of 
evolution. He developed in children a conscious- 
ness of the barbarian in themselves, not as a mys- 
terious and an almost obscene monster to be 
shamefacedly suppressed, but as a cousin of the 
cave-dweller and the ape, a creature that needed 
to be trained and taught its manners so that it 
might become fit for civilised society. But he 
made this consciousness outward-looking; he had 
no desire to train up introspective children. When 
he was talking about the character of an Israel- 
ite or a Norman king, he would speak of it in 
terms of the man's mixed nature, and of his suc- 
cess or failure in controlling or being dominated 
by his under-self. He led children at every turn, 
by methods simple or more mature according to 
their stage of development, to look out upon the 
whole phenomenon of character and conduct as a 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 197 

question of the relation between the higher and 
the more primitive natures of man. 

This part of Ford's method in character train- 
ing relates only to one point in that important 
and little-studied art; but it was the point upon 
which he laid most stress in discussing method 
with us who taught in the school — with Mme. An- 
dree and myself in the first instance, and later 
with his larger staff. He believed that systematic 
handling of the main natural difficulty in train- 
ing character had always been unduly neglected 
in education, and that a confusion between morals 
and natural history has always been a bar to 
clear-headed teaching. But he was far from mak- 
ing natural history explain morals out of exist- 
ence; rather, he strengthened morals by bringing 
them into connection with reason. The moral re- 
sponsibility of his children was the more abso- 
lute because they knew better than most children 
what self-control ought to mean. 

Besides this self-control of the individual, there 
was the question of the individual child's obedi- 
ence to the control of the teacher, and of the nec- 
essary laws of the school community. Here Ford 
made application of principles that are well 
known to the comparatively few who study the 
work and the teachings of the great educators of 
the past. He believed in education through free- 
dom, and for freedom, but he knew that the only 
real liberty is social liberty — the harmony of free- 
dom with obedience that comes of an understand- 



198 W. E. FORD 

ing consent to the control of a reasonable law. ^ 
Ford's chief contribution to method for educa- 
tion in freedom was to insist upon the develop- 
ment by teachers of something which he called 
^Hhe technique of praise/' Our guiding princi- 
ple, he said, was that a thing well done and spon- 
taneously was of far greater educational value 
than a thing well done under constraint. Con- 
straint was necessary in so far as one had not 
yet secured the spontaneity; but it was a second- 
best — a confession of weakness. And constraint 
ultimately rested upon punishments. A punish- 
ment was, as it were, a push from behind. Quite 
an elaborate technique of punishment had been 
worked out by the teaching profession — all of it 
unsatisfactory, because punishment is in itself an 
unsatisfactory method. But if we disliked, as 
all teachers dislike, this clumsy and unsatisfac- 
tory push from behind, why had we not developed 
a method of pulling from the front? 

A member of the staff (I am quoting from my 
recollection of a staff meeting) complained that 
Ford had done away mth the means to that end 
— marks and prizes. Ford explained once more 
his view that there is a special faculty for accu- 
mulating marks, passing examinations and win- 
ning prizes, which has very little relation to the 
genuine educational values. Those who achieve 
academic success are seldom those who make a 
success of life. One cannot measure a child's 

*I have dealt with the historical development of this idea in 
The Permanent Values in Education. (Constable, 1917.) 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 199 

quality in the quantitative, numerical language of 
marks ; and in trying to do so, one actually meas- 
ures something akin to, but different from, the 
faculty for amassing money — some talent for 
gathering and hoarding, in its essence a form of 
greed. This is not the right incentive to learn- 
ing ; it is an ulterior motive ; and, worse, a wrong 
ulterior motive. 

The real motive for aspiring to wisdom and 
goodness, Ford proceeded to urge, is, simply, wis- 
dom and goodness for their own sake ; but children 
do need some test of their own advance — some 
recognition from outside to reassure their own 
inner consciousness that their reasonable self-ap- 
probation when they have done well is not mis- 
placed. Marks are a clumsy and an ineffectual 
form of recognition. They put a premium upon 
the facile, shallow, easily adaptable mind. And 
there is an older, a more natural and fundamental 
reaching-out of the childish consciousness for rec- 
ognition of childish effort: the sane and simple 
desire of childhood for praise when praise is due. 
Ford warmed to his subject. How far, he asked 
us (I paraphrase his words, of course), do we try 
to make our praise expressive and effectual! Our 
encouragement of a child's efforts, when we can 
see them to be sincere and painstaking, ought al- 
ways to be articulate and inspiring. The hope 
of our discriminating praise ought to be a far 
stronger incentive for a child than the fear of our 
clumsy punishments. If we could only learn to 



200 W. E. FORD 

praise rightly, Ford concluded, there might be a 
hope that punishments would become altogether 
unnecessary. The need for the clumsy push from 
behind, in fact, might vanish, if only the pull from 
before were made effectual. 

Eventually, Ford practically abolished punish- 
ments from the school. He made it a rule that 
every case of insubordination, idleness, or other 
cause of reprobation should be referred directly 
to himself; and when he had talked over the dif- 
ficulty with the child who was at fault there was 
seldom any need for punitive retribution. Gen- 
erally there was at the root of the trouble some 
misunderstanding between the child and the 
teacher; certainly this was always the case with 
any child whom I myself '^sent up.^' Ford could 
always see that I had made a mistake somewhere, 
and could tell me what was wrong; usually I had 
failed to make the child see what he should be 
aiming at, and had stupidly tried to exercise the 
blind * ^ push from behind. ^ ' In so far as the child, 
too, had been in the wrong. Ford brought into play 
his customary principle of exacting, not retribu- 
tion, but reparation ; and I often had a recalcitrant 
pupil return from his talk with Ford full of apolo- 
gies and promises of amendment. The apologies, 
by the time Ford had done with the two of us, 
were usually mutual. 

I had known Ford, and had learned to trust him, 
through many year s. Some of my colleagues, in 
the later'^clevelopineht oi th'e^cEbol, 3T3' nor^iiow 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 201 

him, and could not trust Mm when it came to 
maintenance of a child's rights and dignities 
against their own. This was one of the reasons 
for the failure of as hopeful an educational ex- 
periment as has ever been made in England. 



CHAPTER IX 

It has been said, and with a certain amount of 
truth, that a headmaster can keep on good terms 
with his school or with his staff, but not with 
both. Ford's staff approved of his methods of 
teaching and worked hard to apply them, but there 
was something in his wider attitude towards edu- 
cation that seemed inevitably to rouse a certain 
kind of mistrust. Put in simple terms, the feel- 
ing was that his system as a whole would make 
children too good to live. Different forms of 
this fundamental misgiving were continually crop- 
ping up at staff meetings, in relation to one detail 
after another of educational practice. I do not 
want, in this matter, to indulge in retrospective 
criticism of those who were my colleagues in the 
carrying out of Ford's work; the principle under- 
lying their uneasiness was sincerely held, and pa- 
tiently discussed with Ford in all its protean 
shapes. 

It would be a somewhat technical business to 
make this deeply rooted difference of opinion clear 
by tracing its subtle influence through a descrip- 
tion of a typical staff-meeting discussion of school 
method ; and the objection which Ford had so con- 
tinually to answer was best and most simply put 
into words by Mr. Wishart, during an after-dinner 

202 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 203 

talk. Ford and I had gone to dine with Mr. and 
Miss Wishart after one of the weekly staff meet- 
ings at the school ; Mr. Wishart, occasionally pres- 
ent at staff-meetings (where he would drop out 
a common sense suggestion from time to time, 
never without its value), had on that occasion 
been away, as was more usual. We were at about 
the middle of the school's third term; the twenty- 
two children gathered in by the end of the first 
term had been increased to thirty-three; there 
were four forms (kindergarten. Forms la and lb, 
and Form II.), and two more trained teachers, a 
master and a mistress, had brought the staff, with 
Ford, up to five. The two newer members and 
Mme. Andree had been giving voice that after- 
noon to their searchings of spirit over several of 
the details in Ford's treatment of current prob- 
lems ; and Ford, as we sat with our coffee in the 
Wisharts' drawing-room, was talking about his 
difficulty in seeing what was the obstacle, exactly, 
at which they always appeared to pull up short. 
*^ People generally pull up when they can't see 
where you're leading them," suggested Mr. Wish- 
art; and he went on to say, in effect, that there 
was something in Ford's system that puzzled him, 
and that perhaps it would be this that disquieted 
the three teachers, though they might not quite 
know it. He was more outside the school; they, 
very likely, couldn't see the wood for the trees, 
and could only jib at this and that detail. His 
trouble was that he couldn't see what was to be- 
come of Ford's pupils, eventually, in the knock- 



204 W. E. FORD 

about conditions of the everyday world. It wasn 't 
that he was afraid they would be soft ; but he was 
afraid they would be too fine. Ford was teaching 
them to think about what is right, he said, with a 
humorous suggestion of disapproval in his tone. 
While a man is thinking about what is right, he 
added, other folk march along and trample over 
him. Did he mean, Ford inquired, that they ought 
to know how to trample back? Mr. Wishart 
wouldn't go so far as to say that; but it was some- 
thing of the sort, he admitted, that he had in mind. 
Not exactly trampling ... no ; rather the kind of 
spirit that could resist trampling. 

'*But aren't we trying to get that!" Ford put 
in. Was not the spirit of real thought — the re- 
flective spirit — exactly the spirit that would end 
its reflections by refusing to be trodden upon? 
Mr. Wishart was still doubtful. The point that 
he wanted to raise was whether the reflective spirit 
that Ford was training up would not reflect for 
too long — and find out that while it had been re- 
flecting others had been acting, and monopolising 
the first and the best chances. 

Ford was not forgetting, he reminded us, that 
reflection has to result in action. The children 
were learning that all right; and his own idea 
was that sensible reflection would result in better 
conceived action. But this was just the point upon 
which Mr. Wishart took him up. His whole doubt 
was whether Ford 's spirit of reflection might not 
be a snare and a delusion from the practical point 
of view. It was a fine thing in itself, but it only 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 205 

existed for itself. If you began reflecting, in a 
philosophical way, you went on reflecting — for the 
sake of an intellectual satisfaction. You thought 
for the sake of thinking; and then you got over- 
taken by the man who thinks for the sake of busi- 
ness. 

Ford gave a thoughtful pause to this. ** You're 
perfectly right, Mr. Wishart,'' he said at last. 
That standpoint, he went on, was entirely reason- 
able and coherent. But honestly, which was the 
better type — the man who thinks for the sake of 
thought, or the man who thinks for the sake of 
business 1 Was not the one in search of the spirit- 
ual reality, and the other only in search of the 
material? 

But we have to live by the material; this was 
Mr. Wishart's objection — and that was the fault 
that he found with Ford's system. It was a grand 
system, but he was afraid of its becoming alto- 
gether too spiritual. 

Miss Wishart looked up quickly from her 
needle-work. ^^Can anything be too spiritual?'' 
she asked quietly. Ford, too, had looked up at 
the sound of her voice, and their eyes met for a 
moment. 

^'You're right, Margaret," said Mr. Wishart. 
Perhaps, he went on, he should not have said * ' too 
spiritual." Perhaps he had meant, rather, too 
metaphysical. Ford characterised this as a really 
valuable piece of criticism. Mr. Wishart meant, 
he suggested, that he tended to encourage think- 
ing just for the sake of thinking — just for the en- 



206 W. E. FORD 

joyment of the process — instead of for the spirit 
of truth which ought to be behind the thought. 

Mr. Wishart confessed that he had had the no- 
tion in his mind ; but he could see that it was not 
true. It was, he saw, the spirit behind that Ford 
wanted to bring out. And it was a fine spirit — 
but it was just its fineness that he was afraid of. 
He would grant freely that it was right, . . . 

**And will you grant me that it is its rightness 
that you're afraid of?" asked Ford, quietly inter- 
rupting. 

Mr. Wishart would grant even that, in a sense. 
He could see where Ford was driving him. Ford 
did not think, he said, that any one can be too 
right; so he was driving him on to put what is 
practical before what is right. Well, his defence 
was that nothing is right unless it is practical 
as well. 

Ford wholly agreed, but objected that they were 
beginning to argue in a circle. Suppose he, Ford, 
stood out for training children in pure rightness 
of thought — ^what was Mr. Wishart 's objection? 

Mr. Wishart 's objection was, in essence, that 
Ford would then be training up a race of intellec- 
tual martyrs. These young thinkers of his were 
bound to suffer — terribly. 

Ford took leave to doubt it. They were not 
growing up into such pure, unmitigated thinkers 
as Mr. Wishart imagined. They were learning 
to make their thinking practical — learning how to 
**get ahead," even in business. But — suppose for 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 207 

the sake of argument that they all had to become 
martyrs in the cause of truth — what then? 

Then, in Mr. Wishart's drily expressed opinion, 
their parents would consider themselves to have 
been extensively swindled. Parents wanted their 
children taught to be successes, not picturesque 
failures. Perhaps, Ford allowed, that is what 
parents think they want. But he insisted that 
what they really want, if they are decent parents, 
is that their children may be good — clever after- 
wards, and successful after that, if fortune is fa- 
vourable ; but good, whatever may happen to them 
in consequence. 

Miss Wishart looked up again, and again met 
Ford's eyes. Then she looked at her father. What 
the children wanted, she said, was just goodness, 
whether the parents or the teachers really wanted 
it for them or not. That was her own reason for 
thinking that Ford was in the right. 

Mr. Wishart gave a businesslike sigh. On re- 
flection he, too, was afraid that Ford was right. 
The children had to concentrate on goodness — 
and then dree their weird. Ford was not going 
to accept this judgment without qualification. The 
* ^ weird, ' ' he was certain, would not prove so fate- 
ful as Mr. Wishart imagined. He slyly suggested 
that what Mr. Wishart was really afraid of was 
not goodness, but unco ' guidness — a quality which 
he had no intention whatever of encouraging. 

I was not wholly surprised to learn, a week or 
two later, that Ford and Miss Wishart were to 
be married as soon as the summer holidays be- 



208 W. E. FORD 

gan. There had been indications which even a 
young teacher, fresh in enthusiasm for his art, 
was too hnman to pass by without a sapient 
glance. I had felt sure of it ; and I was glad when 
the definite news came. Ford's happiness was 
beautiful to see ; and since happiness, to him, was 
a thing that naturally translated itself into in- 
spired work, he seemed somehow to infect the 
school, children and staff alike, with the radiant 
enthusiasm that overflowed from him. It was as 
though the school itself were in love. 

Ford and his wife left for Normandy early in 
August, 1905. I had acted as best man at their 
simple wedding — only the Wisharts and a few 
near friends were present — and in a few days I 
had a letter from Ford referring, in the first in- 
stance, to my carrying out that office : — 

EvREux, Aug. 6, 1905. 
Dear K., — I never thanked you for your efficient 
steersmanship, while if it hadn't been for you I might 
have gone to the wrong church and married the wrong 
lady, and been carried off for all I know to Mentone or 
even Monte Carlo! Expect no sense from me; I am 
countless centuries old to-day, and much too wise to 
talk sense; also I am an infant and inarticulate. Mar- 
garet (I haven't learnt to say "my wife" yet — it's the 
thought of that phrase that drives men to go honey- 
mooning abroad — and anyhow I shan't use it to you) 
says she caught you looking very end-of-a-chapterish 
just before we went off. Remember I'm not going to 
stand any beastly pride from you when we come back 
— the new chapter begins exactly where the old one left 
off.— Yours ever, W. E. F. 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 209 

Mr. and Mrs. Ford came home full of plans 
for '^completing the circle," as Ford put it, of 
the school's life. They had talked over at length 
the difficulty which Ford had begun to experience 
in getting the staff to go with him whole-heartedly, 
and also the comparative failure of the school, in 
most cases, to win the co-operation of the parents ; 
and they had great hopes that under the new 
menage a more effectual meeting of minds would 
be possible. Ford spoke to me of their conclu- 
sions soon after their return. He had taken very 
seriously the tentative phrase to which Mr. Wish- 
art's criticism — identical, we believed, with the 
subconscious criticism of the staff — had reduced 
itself. It was perfectly true, he said, that his con- 
tact with us all, children, staff and parents, had 
been ''too metaphysical.'' His own instinct al- 
ways was to search out and explain the philosophy 
of school work, and to be satisfied when he had 
done so and also translated the philosophy into 
effective practice. With children, this succeeded 
perfectly. All children are bom philosophers, if 
by a philosopher we understand one who loves to 
search out the nature and the causes of things, 
and not necessarily to explain them in compli- 
cated and abstract language. Ford's philosophy 
for the young was sufficiently concrete and prac- 
tical, as his method of teaching them to apply 
every principle to everyday life clearly evinces; 
but he was not at this time quite satisfied in his 
own mind about his teaching system. Might it 
not be, after all, *Hoo metaphysical" — too closely 



210 W. E. FORD 

dependent upon intellect — tending too much to iso- 
late intellect? He thought that perhaps he was 
neglecting the direct simplicities of approach to 
a child's mind through feelings and instincts. 

I do not think he was right in this idea, as far 
as he himself was concerned; he taught through 
feelings and instincts more than he knew. Pos- 
sessing the ^* strong personality" so much desid- 
erated by Mrs. A. and Mrs. B., he felt the need 
to keep it in the background. It shone through 
his work strongly enough whatever he was doing. 
But I think it was true, as I haltingly tried to ex- 
plain to him, that the intellectual harness in which 
he kept himself might be heavy for those who 
were working with him. His method without him- 
self tended to become too abstract in a teacher's 
mind; and the teacher, as was natural, instinc- 
tively laid the blame upon the method. Ford said 
that this instinct was not only natural, but per- 
fectly just. It was his business to arrange method 
so that it would work in other hands than his own. 
In so far as it became artificial to the staff, and led 
them to think that he wanted the children taught 
to be too exclusively philosophical, it was wrong 
method, and needed recasting — simplifying. I 
was angry at this self -accusation. Ford's method, 
I felt, was too fine a thing to be watered down to 
suit teachers who would not make the effort to 
understand it; and I blurted out something to 
this effect. Ford said that better understanding 
was what he chiefly hoped for, now. Mrs. Ford 
would be able to help. We must thaw some of the 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 211 

professional frigidity out of tlie staff meetings. 
A clrawing-room, and the comfortable pervasive- 
ness of afternoon tea, would do a good deal. I 
took in the implication that Mrs. Ford's particu- 
lar gift in conversation — her power of quietly stat- 
ing an issue in its simplest human terms — would 
do a good deal more. 

The influence of a drawing-room, and of its pre- 
siding mistress, was to have its effect, too, upon 
the relation between the school and the parents. 
''They are always on their hind legs with me,'' 
Ford observed. It was true that he had never 
overcome the tendency of most of the parents to 
stand upon the defensive with him. They thought 
him ''so clever," and were afraid to give them- 
selves away. Mrs. Ford was, actually, of the 
greatest possible help in getting the school and 
the parents upon easy terms. Both in this and 
in promoting the education of the staff, her pres- 
ence was a source of strength for the more diffi- 
cult time that lay ahead — the time when Ford's 
system would have to struggle to make good its 
hold upon children of an age to have their careers 
seriously considered and to be sent off, in the in- 
terest of their careers, to go through the conven- 
tional scholastic mill. 

The year that succeeded Ford's marriage was a 
year of quiet, happy work with everything going 
well. Numbers increased, and the school extended 
upwards into three new forms, with a correspond- 
ing increase of staff. Mr. Wishart's plan for the 
gradual, tentative introduction of co-education had 



212 W. E. FORD 

worked admirably; Ford's was known and recog- 
nised by this time as a *'boys-and-girls" school, 
and no one appeared to think the fact, thus gradu- 
ally accomplished, anything but right and natu- 
ral. The children were reaching an age, however, 
when the girls' work began to diverge from the 
boys' in a few practical subjects, and it was a 
good think that a mistress of the house should be 
at the head of these activities. Mrs. Ford had 
not made a technical study of domestic economy, 
but she had managed a good-sized household with 
Scottish thriftiness, and could teach from experi- 
ence rather than from theory. 

I believe it was Mrs. Ford who sensed a per- 
sonal feeling at the root of that uneasiness on the 
part of the staff which Ford and Mr. Wishart had 
identified only with an impersonal solicitude for 
the children. Ford's system was not rigid; every 
teacher was called upon to make an individual 
contribution to its working, and to think and plan 
for its realisation in detail and for the linking-up 
of its parts ; but it was very definitely Ford's sys- 
tem all the time — if only because Ford thought and 
planned very much more effectually than the rest 
of us. This made some of the staff feel that they 
had less control than was their due ; and the feel- 
ing was accentuated by Ford's scheme of having 
every difficulty of discipline referred directly to 
himself. In both cases we all knew that Ford was 
right: his system of teaching would have gone 
to pieces if any of us had been able to fly off at a 
tangent upon any method of our own, regardless 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 213 

of the need to unify the whole ; and the plain fact 
that Ford, by taking all matters of discipline into 
his own hands, had done away with the continual 
drizzle of small, futile punishments that usually 
disfigures the work of a school, was enough to pre- 
vent any one from wanting their individual con- 
trol back in that respect. But it is possible both 
to see that a thing is right, and to resent it. 

The continual hankering of the staff for a sys- 
tem of marks and prizes was partly an expression 
of their desire to wield some symbol of personal 
authority. Ford wanted all control, including his 
own, to be as impersonal as possible — as much as 
possible an appeal to the children's own desire 
for the best, both as individuals and as a com- 
munity. But he recognised that something in the 
nature of a Votes for Teachers agitation was at 
the back of the staff's mind, and tried to work 
out a right answer to the inarticulate demand. 
He hit upon a new system of marks and prizes in 
consequence. At the end of a term every teacher 
was to make a list of children who had done thor- 
oughly well, in that teacher's opinion, in one sub- 
ject or another. Ford carefully explained that we 
were not necessarily to put down the name of a 
child who could be considered as ^^top of the 
Form" in a particular subject, but of the child 
who seemed to have worked the hardest and to 
have made the most progress considering his ca- 
pabilities. To be mentioned in this way upon a 
teacher's end-of-term list was to receive one vote 
towards a *^ progress prize"; this prize, in each 



214 W. E. FORD 

Form, went to the child who had the greatest 
number of teachers' votes. When two children 
in a Form tied for the prize, their claims were 
settled by the votes of the other children in that 
Form — votes that were always cast with the im- 
partiality of the strong childish sense of justice. 

The system worked well in every way: it was 
Ford's *^ technique of praise" in concrete and offi- 
cial form; there was a general feeing that the 
prizes had gone to the children who really de- 
served them best, and the staff felt that their 
judgment had found voice. At the same time the 
system was not in its essence competitive — and 
to that extent did not satisfy the other underly- 
ing demand of the staff, that Ford's school should 
give more of a preparation for the worldly scram- 
ble. On this point Ford was obdurate. He re- 
garded competition as an evolutionary stage more 
than ready to be superseded in civilised life by 
co-operation, and held that the old competitive im- 
pulse in man, like the combative impulse, was 
strong enough — and troublesome enough — without 
being fostered by education. 

It is difficult to write about the later develop- 
ment of Ford's school, the development through 
which we hoped it would gradually blossom out 
into an educational institution of effective size and 
influence, and even, perhaps, set going some small 
wave of general reform in education. To de- 
scribe it, now, is to describe its failure to achieve 
these ideals, in the rather desperate hope that 
this failure may lead others to follow a similar 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY S15 

educational ideal with success. Ford's ideal is 
worth following; of that no one who worked with 
him or studied under him has the slightest doubt. 
If I make an attempt to trace the causes of its 
failure, it is not with any idea of demonstrating 
the hopelessness of a fine educational ideal under 
present conditions, but rather of showing how 
far the ideal could be, and was, carried, and why 
the difficulties arose that prevented it from being 
carried further. I have used, and repeated, the 
word *^ failure*'; but I must be understood to 
mean the failure, not of the ideal, but of its r; 
to a further pitch of development than Ford 
achieved in the first decade of the twentieth cen- 
tury. The failure passes; the ideal, surely, is 
worthy to remain. And the ^^ failure" was only 
the fact that Ford's educational impetus was 
brought to a standstill at one particular milestone, 
beyond which, perhaps, few of his time could have 
followed him. 

It would be easier to dwell upon his success 
— upon the fact that a few hundred children 
passed through his hands who never wholly for- 
got his influence, and who in their turn are spread- 
ing by now some reflection, at least, of the light 
that suffused his teaching. But it is better, I 
think, to ask why his teaching, comparatively, 
failed ; to try to ascertain how it was that so fine 
an educational method could not establish itself 
beyond the point at which convention called a halt. 

Convention crystallises itself, to my own view, 
in the person of the uncle of one of our children, 



216 W. E. FORD 

who came with the child's mother to look over the 
school. He was large, bluff, friendly, and inac- 
cessible even to the most slangy expression of 
an educational notion. Ford told him that we tried 
to teach the children to pull together — a suffi- 
ciently sporting simplification of our educational 
idea; the uncle rephed, taking on a redder tinge 
with the eiTort of abstract thought, that kids had 
to learn how to fight for their own hand if they 
were going to make their way in the world. He 
was afraid that his small nephew would ^^get 
soft,'' he said, **with all these girls around" (his 
nephew had at any rate learned how to meet a 
girl's hard common sense) ; he was glad that the 
boy should be learning to think, but he consid- 
ered (with Mrs. A. and in almost the same words) 
that ^ * there is too much thinking nowadays. ' ' As 
a study in current humanity he was a joy to Ford 
— a joy often quoted, later on. As the influential 
uncle of one of our children, he stood for Ford as 
the shape and symbol of our most insuperable 
obstacle. As he turned to go away with the boy's 
mother we heard him say — ^before he could have 
thought, if he had thought, to be out of earshot — 
'^My dear girl, when are you going to send that 
child to a proper school?" 

Boys who went from Ford's to a *^ proper 
school" always did well. They were seldom 
placed high at the first transplanting — I can im- 
agine a certain bewilderment at the difference of 
standard, a bewilderment not unshared by those 
who applied to them a rule-of-thumb test of 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 217 

knowledge; but they liad learned to think, and 
quickly mastered the main lines of a more auto- 
matic method of instruction. It was a common 
thing for a boy from Ford's to be promoted twice 
in his first term elsewhere, and promoted again 
every term until he had found his level. Ford 
might have been content, as, some years later, he 
said himself, simply to train up young children 
so that they might climb the conventional ladder 
of learning the more nimbly. All educational re- 
form has its best chance with the youngest chil- 
dren, and the most sensible and natural form of 
education in England is to be found in the kinder- 
gartens ; Ford might have been satisfied by being 
allowed to carry a rational method to a further 
stage. But his training of younger children, 
much as he loved the work, was only the founda- 
tion for a very much wider and fuller scheme. It 
was for the realisation of this scheme that he 
struggled during the last two years of the school 's 
life. 

His hope was to build up and extend the school 
until it carried children through to University 
age or to the age when they should go out into the 
world. It could not satisfy him to begin and end 
by preparing children to make the best of con- 
ventional education and its disjointed compro- 
mises. His work as an educator reached out to 
a single, definite goal — that the school should send 
into the world of thought and action young men 
and women who had learned the unity of all knowl- 
edge with itself and with life. It may well be 



218 W. E. FORD 

imagined that if his children were sent away to 
learn the parcelling-up and pigeon-holing of 
knowledge that for many people constitutes edu- 
cation, it was little comfort to Ford that he had 
trained them so that they could do it intelligently. 
He could not take a pride in their lending their 
intelligence to a process which he regarded as fun- 
damentally stupid — the process of putting up par- 
titions in the mind between different "subjects/' 
dividing and subdividing, seldo mor neer uniting. 
This was not merely a matter of scholastic the- 
ory to him. He believed the whole outlook of civ- 
ilised people to be qualified by their prevailing 
inability to hold more than one idea in their heads 
at a time — and their inability, as he once said, 
"to put their heads together over any question 
without knocking them together. ' ' Discussion, he 
said, is the machinery of agreement, which is pre- 
liminary to the co-operation that distinguishes 
civilised from barbaric life; and we do not dis- 
cuss, we dispute. Each of us follows up his own 
narrow train of thought, firmly states his own 
narrow conclusion, and has done with it; you 
rarely find two parties to a discussion attending 
to each other's argument — the first, elementary 
necessity if they are to agree. As Ford traced all 
the failures of civilisation in some measure to 
failure of agreement, so he traced failure of agree- 
ment to the division and separation of ideas that 
are fostered by our prevailing modes of teaching. 
Division there had to be — dissection, careful ar- 
rangement and classification; but always with a 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 219 

view to subsequent reconstruction and reunion, 
the fuller and more complete for the division that 
had gone before. Our usual system of education, 
he said, divides ; and then forgets to reunite. 

It was thought by some that Ford's eventual 
abandonment of his school was due to infirmity of 
purpose, or to a kind of petulance; in reality, 
he gave it up rather than make it auxiliary to the 
conventional system. It was not that he despaired 
of prevailing methods; he believed that they 
could and would be obliged to undergo a process 
of gradual, organic reform; but he believed that 
this reform could only be brought about from 
within — ^not, at any rate, by children, barely 
grounded in a different way of thought. These 
would only show themselves somewhat more intel- 
ligent pigeon-holers than the rest. Ford's desire 
was to show the completed result of a properly 
unified system; and it was because this essential 
aim of his proved impossible of achievement that 
he gave up the attempt. 

A single instance will perhaps show best what 
it was that he declined to continue doing. A boy 
of fourteen, one of our most sensible all-round 
thinkers though in no way particularly brilliant, 
and the son of parents who had always shown a 
keen and an understanding interest in the school, 
was one upon whom we had securely reckoned to 
go on with us. It was rather suddenly decided 
(perhaps an uncle, in this case, had a say in the 
matter — I do not know) that the boy should go 
to one of the greater public schools. Such a de- 



220 W. E. FORD 

f ection of the faithful was always a grief to Ford. 
He saw that it was not wholly the parents* fault. 
The keeping of effective numbers in the upper 
part of the school — now just passing the age of 
fourteen, the conventional time of transition to 
public- school life — ^was an uncertain business ; and 
parents who were most keen that the building up 
of the school should continue were also afraid 
that only a straggling few would remain to consti- 
tute the upper forms for which we hoped. But, 
as Ford always pointed out to them, they did not 
greatly help to remove this fear by taking their 
own children away. 

Ford did not plan to teach Greek until the age 
of sixteen, when it could be learned with quick- 
ness and certainty by children trained in the gen- 
eral study of the science of language; this boy 
was required to pass an entrance examination 
that included elementary Greek, within six weeks ' 
time. Ford gave him half an hour's coaching 
every afternoon, without homework, to teach him 
Greek and the particular formalisms required for 
examination-passing in general. With these six 
weeks of quiet, unhurried preparation the boy 
passed the examination easily. He had been so 
trained that, as Greek was only a special case of 
a known system of language, so the unfamiliar 
formalisms of the examination system were only 
a special and a somewhat narrow way of express- 
ing certain parts of a realised system of knowl- 
edge. The boy took a good place in the public 
school and rose rapidly. He came to see us sev- 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 221 

eral times later on. His work at school, parcelled 
out into a series of watertight compartments, was 
growing steadily narrower in its scope; he was 
learning no natural science, scarcely anything 
about his own language, nothing to any purpose 
except different, disconnected branches of clas- 
sics and mathematics. He remained keen and full 
of interest in the world and its concerns, but with 
an unguided keenness and an ignorant interest. 
Plainly his interests ^and his knowledge were 
growing more and more detached from one an- 
other. His work was giving him no terms in 
which to think and speak about the real concerns 
of life. It was just work, to be done and put aside. 
The boy's mind and his nature, which we had 
watched growing into an effective whole while he 
was with us, were growing apart — the one sterile, 
the other starved of thought. 

It was against results of this kind that Ford's 
soul revolted; and they began to appear with in- 
creasing regularity during the school's last two 
years, when one child after another drifted away 
at about the age of fourteen, to return presently 
as an ^^old" boy or girl, shyly affectionate, full 
of inarticulate phrases of gratitude for old times, 
and manifestly resigned to new times that gave 
them little satisfaction of the spirit. They came 
back, as Ford once said, with their wings tidily 
and neatly clipped — no cheerful spectacle for the 
man who had trained them in the beginnings of 
the art of mental flight. 

A Form of children over fourteen — Form V. — 



L 



222 W. E. FORD 

struggled into being with the opening of what was 
to prove the last year of the school's life. There 
was some talk of making it a Form of boys alone ; 
but Mr. Wishart, who first threw out the idea, 
never entertained it seriously. None of us had 
the least doubt by now upon the merits of the co- 
educational case; and from the point of view of 
success, there had been very little evidence that 
prejudice on this subject stood in the school's way. 
Parents who withdrew their children often la- 
mented that a ''proper school" would have to be 
a separate boys' or girls' school; and it seemed 
likely that in excluding girls from the new upper 
forms we might lose not only the girls, but one or 
two boys as well — besides surrendering a princi- 
ple in which we had learned by experience to be- 
lieve. Ford, indeed, was sure that to educate 
small boys and girls together was chiefly impor- 
tant as leading up to natural relations during 
adolescence ; it was then that the principal advan- 
tage of co-education — "the civilising of the sexes" 
— would really begin. It was not the least of the 
tragedy which the school's ending implied for 
him that this development of a sane intellectual 
understanding between adolescent boys and girls 
was denied the thought and care which he was 
so ready and eager to devote to it. 

The struggle for existence which was the or- 
deal of Form V. during that concluding year can 
best be presented in three acts — the three terms 
of the school's last twelvemonth. The starting of 
the Form was in any case a precarious undertak- 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 223 

ing. There were five children, three boys and 
two girls, who had surpassed the standard of 
Form TVay and whose parents had faith enough 
to let them adventure upon the further course. 
Ford felt that it was now or never — to reject this 
somewhat meagre opportunity of extension would 
be to put a closure upon later opportunities — and 
Mr. Wishart agreed that the new Form had bet- 
ter be started. When another boy, withdrawn by 
provisional notice given before the preceding sum- 
mer term, was unexpectedly returned to the fold 
at the end of the summer holidays, we rejoiced 
as at a favourable omen. Form V. would now 
come into being full six strong. And when an- 
other girl, a new-comer of fifteen, elder sister of 
a boy already in the school, was entered on the 
very day that term began, we felt that at this rate 
ultimate success was assured. Seven children 
who had crossed the fourteen-year-old Rubicon 
were a nucleus worthy of respect for the founda- 
tion of an upper school. I think that at this time 
we all upheld one another in a desperate opti- 
mism; Mrs. Ford, I remembered, even brought 
in the argument that seven was a lucky number. 
The autumn term seemed to begin under the 
happiest auspices — and in three weeks there was 
trouble brewing among the staff. Perhaps there 
was an underconsciousness that our hopes ran be- 
yond our prospects ; but the instinct even of rats 
leads them to do nothing worse than desert a ship 
that is doomed to sink. They do not accelerate 
the sinking by gnawing at her sides. Our rats 



I 



W. E. FORD 

talked with one anotlier, and with some of the 
parents, and their talk was of the kind that disin- 
tegrates loyalty. I am convinced, I must say in 
justice, that they had no conscious motive in doing 
so; they helped in their degree to pull Ford's 
school down because they felt unsure of its suc- 
cess, and so felt in honour bound to prophesy, 
and to exonerate themselves from, its failure. 
But incidentally they lost the school two of its 
seven elder pupils; and this was the conclusion 
of the first act. 

The spring term that followed found us with 
five elder children, four of them under provisional 
notice to leave if more should not be forthcoming. 
The spring term is always the least cheerful 
of terms ; colds rage, even if more formidable epi- 
demics are absent, and in any case human enthu- 
siasm is liable to fall to its lowest ebb some- 
where about the end of February — "the year's 
two-o 'clock-in-the-morning, " as Ford once put it. 
The parents of our Form V. talked with one an- 
other, and with the more despondent members of 
the staff; and thereafter Ford and Mrs. Ford 
talked with them in vain. They were convinced 
— perhaps they were right — that Form V. would 
never grow into a completed upper school. Pro- 
visional notices were confirmed; the existence of 
Form V. was to end with the ending of the spring 
term. 

Ford had lost. We talked it over in full con- 
clave — the staff a little remorseful, and inclined, 
too late, to try to see the bright side of things — 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 225 

towards the end of tlie term. There was no hope 
at all of building up a new upper school ; the rot 
had already spread to the parents of Forms IVa 
and even lYb, who were giving panic-stricken 
notice of removal at the end of the next term. 
The staff, I believe, really hoped that at last this 
ambitious foolishness of trying to extend the 
school beyond the preparatory level might be at 
an end. The attitude of Ford and his wife, fully 
backed up by Mr. Wishart, came as a surprise to 
them. The school was not to continue as a pre- 
paratory. It was to end with the following sum- 
mer term ; and notice of its winding-up was to be 
sent to all the parents forthwith. This was the 
mildly and by no means pleasantly dramatic con- 
clusion of the second act. I did not envy Ford 
his Easter holidays — I did not enjoy my own. 
He and his wife went with Mr. Wishart to North 
Cornwall, and the three talked, I believe, at length 
about the possibility of another educational 
scheme, always to come back to the fact of pres- 
ent failure. They could form no judgment, in 
the end, but that the present failure was absolute, 
and under present conditions irreparable. Ford 
began at this time, I know, to look beyond the proc- 
ess of education itself for the causes of the fail- 
ure, and to ask himself what might be the funda- 
mental trouble of a civilisation so slow to develop 
its educational function. But his dealing with 
this wider problem must be the subject of another 
chapter. 
The third act, the summer term, our last term. 



226 W. E. FORD 

opened in false sunshine, as false as the May 
clondlessness that led on to the downpours of 
June and July. It was not that the ill weather 
of our final weeks symbolised a prevailing gloom- 
iness among ourselves ; the school went down with 
all its flags flying, and in a way there was more 
of essential harmony in its work at the end than 
there had even been before. Ford seemed re- 
solved to throw the very best of himself into a last 
effort on behalf of the school's remnant, and we 
were all infected with his energy and enthusiasm. 
Misgivings among the staif were at an end, except 
the misgiving that it might be a heroic mistake to 
refuse to go on quietly with the material for good 
work that still remained. But there was a sense 
of finality over it all. It was the end; and if we 
all strove so eagerly to make the most of it, the 
chief reason was because we felt it to be the end. 
If it had been a new, constricted beginning — 
Ford's school with its wings clipped — I doubt if 
the same feeling would have inspired us. I feel 
no doubt at all that it was best for the school to 
end as it did, in cheerful, far from fatalistic rec- 
ognition of the inevitable. It was not the kind of 
school to seek for itself a level that would compro- 
mise with convention. It had to stand or fall in 
the light of Ford's inspiration as an educator; 
ultimately, it had to fall, and Ford had to dig 
deeper into reality to find out why it fell. If it 
had continued, maintaining itself upon a specious 
compromise, it would have grown stagnant, and 
Ford would never have begun to analyse that cen- 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 227 

tral trouble of civilisation which still makes it im- 
possible for such teaching as his to achieve suc- 
cess. 

An idea was mooted by some of the parents for 
keeping the lower forms in being, and two of the 
staff approached Ford and Mr. Wishart with a 
proposal for taking over the younger children. 
Ford was not unwilling that this should be done, 
and even offered to draw up a simplified scheme 
for a young children's school that should aim, 
not at extending its scope, but at providing as 
rational a preparation as possible for conven- 
tional instruction. The plan was not followed up, 
for a variety of reasons. Ostensibly, a financial 
difficulty was the chief obstacle. The school house 
and its arrangements were on a scale that would 
overburden the resources of a small school. But 
a way out of this and the other difficulties that 
arose could have been found if the will had been 
present. When it came to the point, even those 
who had felt the strongest misgivings about 
Ford's wider educational ideal, found themselves 
unable to face the prospect of taking over chil- 
dren whom Ford had taught, and giving them, in- 
evitably, less than Ford had given. Eventually, 
only the kindergarten was kept on, by the faith- 
ful Mme. Andree; Mr. Wishart made her a pres- 
ent on the connection, and she took rooms in the 
neighbourhood and carried on the methods of 
Froebel, with some reminiscence of Ford, until 
family affairs recalled her to Switzerland some 
years later. 



228 W. E. FORD 

One father took the trouble to write to Ford 
a letter that was a reasoned criticism of the de- 
cision to give up the school. While expressing re- 
gret that Ford's ^intelligent system should not 
have met with more quantitative appreciation/' 
he put forward the opinion that it was Ford's 
business as an educator to adjust his system to 
suit the world as it is. ^'Your way is better, I 
fully recognise," he wrote. *'But it has not 
worked; and if our stupidity is to blame for that 
fact (as I certainly think it is), then surely you 
should make things easier for us, not throw us 
over altogether." I wish I had a copy of the re- 
ply that Ford showed to me before he sent it off. 
It expressed his real reasons for dropping the 
school better in a few sentences than I could an- 
alyse them in many pages. The bald gist of it 
was that Ford could only see two ways of educat- 
ing — the right way and the wrong way; he had 
worked out as popularly as possible the way that 
he considered right, and he was not going to do 
the only thing that remained to do: to compro^ 
mise with the way that he considered wrong. In 
this, he explained, he was not setting up an abso- 
lute of rightness in education ; he was simply fol- 
lowing his own nose. When he found that the 
way which he considered right was blocked, he 
could only set himself to find out what the ob- 
struction was and how it might eventually be re- 
nioved. That, he concluded, was an investigation 
which he meant to begin forthwith. 

The real question that he had had to decide 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 229 

was whether the obstacle to the practical success 
of his system — a system, be it remembered, that 
was not his alone, but was based upon educational 
principles long- ago accepted as gospel in theory 
and left on the shelf in practice — was one that 
could be removed by education itself, or one for 
which the cause would have to be sought in some 
flaw of civilisation outside the educational field. 
The fact that the main principles which he fol- 
lowed had been in existence for centuries had the 
casting vote in his decision. Three hundred years 
had passed since the Moravian educator, Come- 
nius, laid down a system of which Ford's was the 
direct descendant; the principles of Comenius 
were everywhere accepted in theory without pro- 
ducing any but the most superficial influence upon 
actual school work. Three hundred years, eight 
or ten generations, Ford considered enough for the 
conversion of sound principle into effectual prac- 
tice, if the evolution of teaching alone were con- 
cerned. The blindest conservatism yields in time 
to a process of gradual, organic development. The 
obstruction must lie outside the educational circle. 
*^ There is a dead hand upon education," Ford 
wrote in a letter to me, **and I have got to find 
out what it is.'' 

He did not expect to find out any immediate, 
easy formula for the explanation of the **dead 
hand." As he thought more about the question 
he saw more and more clearly how large was the 
undertaking to which he had committed himself. 
It was nothing less than a study of civilised so- 



S30 W. E. FORD 

ciety as a whole, an attempt to trace and map out 
all the ramifying influences of social life. Some- 
where among that network of influences there was 
a tangle, a falsity, in which the advance of edu- 
cation was caught up and impeded: and to un- 
ravel the tangle it would be necessary to know 
where every thread ought to lead. It was thus 
that Ford became absorbed in the gigantic sub- 
ject of the organisation of social life; and from 
this, again, that he developed, and left, alas, un- 
finished, a system of social philosophy that will 
be outlined later on.^ 

He threw himself with a certain sternness of 
zeal into the new work. It was of his own free 
will that he abandoned school work but none the 
less for that^ — perhaps the more — he missed his 
school terribly, and needed the consolatory dis- 
traction of hard thinking. He found another sol- 
ace in watching with Mrs. Ford the dawning in- 
telligence of the two little girls who had been 
born to them. There remained a note of restrained 
sadness in Ford's expression ever after the giv- 
ing up of the school, and I think no one but his 
wife knew quite how hard he had been hit; but 
to see him with his children was to see the old 
Ford as though no reverse had happened to him 
in all his life. He seemed to participate in the 
freshness of their experience, to feel in himself 
the infantile, elemental wonder with which his 
babies looked out upon the visible universe. 

* This reference is to the larger work we have under considera- 
tion, and not to the few notes on Ford 's philosophy which make up 
chapter xi. 



CHAPTER X 

Ford's great undertaking began, as Ms venture 
into school-keeping had begun, with the study of 
authorities ; he became again a frequenter of the 
British Museum reading-room, and began to fill 
the first of a series of manuscript books (I have 
seventeen of these before me) with notes upon 
the natural history of civilisation. One point 
struck him almost from the first. I remember 
his speaking of it to me, certainly within a month 
of beginning his investigation ; and it creeps into 
his first note-book at the ninth page, becoming 
more and more pronounced thereafter. The au- 
thorities were all profoundly ignorant of some- 
thing that Ford dimly knew. Or rather, they were 
congenitally blind to certain lights or colourings 
in the history of civilisation that struck vividly 
upon his eye, though without immediate signifi- 
cance. 

Ford possessed some undefinable sixth sense 
that often brought him to conclusions more true 
and complete than seemed to be available from 
the evidence before him. He appeared at times, 
in his moods of concentration, literally to orig- 
inate knowledge; reaching out beyond his power 
of clear and acute reasoning there was an intuitive 
faculty that seemed to grasp the evolution of fact 

231 



2S2 W. E. FORD 

without intermediary thought about causes and 
probabilities. It was as though he put himself 
in touch with the essential process of becoming. 
I am obliged to tantalise the reader as much as 
I am tantalised myself over that elusive realisa- 
tion which was at the root of Ford's eventual 
views upon the progress of man. He loathed 
mystifications, and was always lucid and illum- 
inating upon any point that he had reasoned out; 
but these intuitive conclusions of his refused to 
fit into any formula. I could say that his early 
intuition of a flaw in our whole conception of 
civilisation was this or that, but only to find that 
it was really the other — an *^ other'' which escapes 
definition. 

I have only one distinct clue: Ford's extraor- 
dinary knowledge of working-class life and 
thought and feeling had something to do with it. 
The ** masses," upon whose labour civilisation 
rests, have an ethic and a philosophy of their 
own, comprehended but unexpressed by them- 
selves, uncomprehended and mis-stated by their 
would-be interpreters. Ford in some way knew 
it from the inside ; and he saw a fundamental un- 
reality in a state of society in which the thoughts 
of the vast majority are a closed book, or rather 
a book wide open but unreadable, to the compara- 
tively few who endeavour to steer the entire bulk. 
**It isn't they" (the masses) ^^who sutfer," he 
once said to me; **it's us." Civilisation, he in- 
sisted, in so far as it is civilisation and not an 
unhappy illusion, is unity, unanimity; and the 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 233 

people at the top, whose privilege of leisure and 
educated thought should mean that they repre- 
sent the mind, the self-consciousness of the whole, 
are simply uncivilised — ^Hamed and pampered 
savages playing at manners,'' as Ford once put 
it — in so far as their consciousness extends only 
to themselves and to their own group. 

This conception of the prevailing culture as an 
essentially hollow thing, a painted shell detached 
from the realities that all men share, gives one 
index, I think, to the flaw which Ford's intuition 
perceived in the civilised life of to-day. But it 
was an explanation much wider and also much 
more definite of which he was in search. I read 
his note-books, and the explanation seems to be 
there, complete and ready, urgent even, to be 
uttered ; I look up from his pages and try to find 
words for the thought, and the whole sense of it 
has vanished. I wonder, if Ford had lived to 
write his book upon the principles of civilisation, 
whether he could have reduced to clear language 
his inner sense that he of had our central stum- 
bling-block. The word ''fellowship" haunts my 
mind when I try to express for myself the essen- 
tial which, in Ford's view, all civilisations have 
lacked; but that is a word whose meaning de- 
pends entirely upon experience of the reality. 

Ford had taken a house in Golden Square; 
partly to be near the Museum, partly because he 
had a curious fondness, which Mrs. Ford found 
no difiiculty in sharing, for the neighbourhood of 



234 W. E. FORD 

Bloomsbury. He said that for middle-class people 
of a serious turn of mind Bloomsbury was the only 
district in London that fitted. Everywhere else 
you found pretentiousness. Kensington was so- 
cially pretentious; Chelsea aesthetically; Bays- 
water, St. John's Wood, Battersea, had each their 
distinctive brand of artificiality. Bloomsbury 
alone, he explained to me with exaggerated solem- 
nity, was wholly, perfectly uncoloured. Its by- 
gone standing as a fashionable quarter gone, it 
had acquired no new status to which it would be 
criminal not to conform ; it was a trifle drab and 
musty, perhaps, but in your own corner you could 
sweep away the dust of the eighteenth century and 
be free to think your own thoughts uncensored. 
The environment of his working hours, the Mu- 
seam reading-room, also satisfied his sense of fit- 
ness. It was an intellectual centre where there 
was a real democracy of intellect. The reader 
in the next place to yours might be a Rabbi trans- 
lating an old Hebrew manuscript, or a veterinary 
student investigating the physiology of the horse ; 
there was no convention of study, and yet you 
were in an atmosphere of study that was quietly 
stimulating. Ford threw out the idea that per- 
haps if every one were left more free to study in 
his own way, an education might be evolved that 
would undermine the artificialities of civilisation. 
It is hardly fair to quote a loose, half-humorous 
statement of this kind, but it indicates the gen- 
eral direction in which Ford's mind was working 
at this time. He wanted to see the art of thinking 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 235 

freed from the vague, atmosplieric, but powerful 
influences that dictate to us, before we begin, what 
we ought to think. 

The mental atmosphere of Bloomsbury and the 
Museum reading-room might be free enough, but 
the physical atmosphere was another matter ; and 
after six months or so Mrs. Ford began to be 
anxious about Ford's health. Ford admitted that 
the British Museum was not an ideal breathing- 
place. ^' There are three kinds of air,'' he said 
to me once, ^' fresh air, stale air, and ventilation. 
Ventilation is the worst of the three." The fil- 
tered, devitalised air of the Museum certainly did 
not suit him ; and Bloomsbury itself is not exactly 
one of the lungs of London. Mrs. Ford declared 
that he had suffered more and lost more vitality 
than he knew, or would recognise, over the failure 
of the school; and there was no doubt, besides, 
that the magnitude of his new task weighed upon 
him; at all events his physical well-being began 
to be a matter of concern. I do not know how far 
this factor, and a growing distaste for ^Ventila- 
tion," made him decide that there was little more 
to be gained by poring over the scores of volumes 
upon his list that were still unread; but I think 
that his disquiet was mainly due to the unsatis- 
factoriness of the learned authorities to whom he 
had turned for guidance at the beginning of his 
quest. He was disappointed that the store of re- 
corded human wisdom told so little ; and the drop 
in his physical vitality was, I think, as much the 
reflex of this disappointment as anything else. 



236 W. E. FORD 

Ford decided, suddenly, to leave his family and 
to go abroad for a time. Mrs. Ford dwelt upon 
the question of his health as the determining rea- 
son ; Ford himself spoke only of the claims of his 
work. He has been severely criticised for spend- 
ing three quarters of his time, in the last years 
of his life, in travelling alone. I am naturally a 
partisan of Ford's upon any point of criticism 
that can be brought against him, but I do not 
think it is for that reason that I cannot see the 
case against him as a deserter of the domesticities. 
If he had been a naval officer, his disappearances 
would have seemed the most natural thing in the 
world; as a philosopher engaged in original re- 
search he had apparently no such claim upon the 
indulgence of some of his friends. He was in pur- 
suit of an important truth; books had told him 
all that they could about the nature of civilisa- 
tion — or had shown him their incapacity to tell 
the thing that he chiefly cared to know; and he 
went about the world to see and discover for him- 
self at first hand. It was his business in life; to 
regard it as a dereliction of marital duty seems 
to me a foolishness past criticism. But there are 
those who have never recognised that in the work 
and thought of Ford's last years lies the principal 
evidence of the greatness of his personality. 

The first purpose of his travelling was to dis- 
cover what are the elements of permanence and 
stability in civilisation. He always remembered 
Palma as a supreme instance of a healthy and con- 
tented human society ; but Pahna was a peaceful 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 237 

backwater in the development of civilisation, 
where the real problems of modem life were not 
worked out but left out. He talked to me at some 
length, one evening about a week before he set out 
upon his first journey. Palma, he said, was the 
foundation, but no more than the foundation, of 
that which he conceived as an ideal society. It was 
the starting-point; a simple and a right form of 
social organisation that was capable of branching 
out into a state of being at once more highly de- 
veloped and more conscious of itself. Every high 
civilisation had been a Palma at one time. Some 
such Arcadian phase was the necessary begin- 
ning. But then every civilisation, in its develop- 
ment, seemed obliged to lose the distinctive, fun- 
damental qualities of the Palma people. Inter- 
ests, ways of thought and language, became de- 
tached from one another ; specialised development 
branched into endless divisions and sub-divisions, 
but the unity of the whole was lost. Ford was 
convinced that disunity in any civilisation is dead- 
ness : that diversification is signal evidence of vi- 
tality, but that diversification which does not lead 
to a further and a fuller unity in difference is a 
sign that vitality is running into a blind alley. He 
had searched the historians in vain for any clear 
recognition of this principle ; and it was essential 
to his investigation to make sure whether the 
branching-out of civilisation into a necessary and 
inevitable diversity of separate paths must nec- 
essarily and inevitably lead to disunity, or 
whether there was any sign that a higher and 



W. E. FORD 

more complex unity tended to supervene — as in 
the evolution of animal life, where diversity of 
organs and functions could only develop hand-in- 
hand with the growth of a centralised, co-ordinat- 
ing nervous system. 

In the one case Ford could only conclude that 
civilisation as we conceive it is a mistake, a mere 
proliferation without purpose, necessarily doomed 
to decline; and that it is our business to resign 
ourselves humbly to the simpler way of life — 
more or less after the Palma model. But if the 
complete unity in diversity which was his own 
ideal of a sound civilisation was attainable, it 
was clear that we were not going the right way 
to attain it. In this case, it was our business to 
investigate the more stable civilisations, and try 
to see what was the principle of permanence to 
which they owed their survival. This the his- 
torians had failed to do, if one can speak of fail- 
ure in a task that has never been attempted. Ford 
intended to travel through India and China for 
a beginning — not, I need hardly say, to invent 
means of adapting the manners and customs of 
Indians and Chinese to English use, but to see if 
he could discover, by observation of their ways 
of life, the particular causes that had given to 
those peoples so long an innings in the history of 
civilisation. He had gained, by his stay in Pahna, 
an experience of unique value to his outlook upon 
human life ; he hoped to catch in the same way the 
essential atmosphere of an ancient and long en- 
during social organisation. 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 239 

The magnitude of the reaction which the East 
produced upon such a mind as Ford's can be 
imagined. The note-books, which record his deep- 
ening impression of an outlook fundamentally dif- 
ferent from the Western, record also a struggle in 
his o\Mi mind — a struggle to escape being swept 
into a wider field of investigation than that upon 
which he had set out. He wanted to realise the 
Eastern philosophy of civilisation; he found it 
closely entangled with an Eastern philosophy of 
the universe. Take this series of jottings from 
one of the note-books : — 

^* Principle of permanence in civilisation is 
unity. Principle of progress is continual diversi- 
fication. Hyp. : the East has an excess of the 
former principle, the West of the latter. 

^'Obj.: Castes. But these are old and fixed — 
no further diversification possible — would be 
thought impious. And they exist in static inter- 
relation — an established unity in difference. 

'^Nirvana ^: Very significant that in this ideal 
of an ultimate state no attraction whatever is 
held out but absolute union with deity; i.e. unity 
must end by swallowing up diversity, not perfect- 
ing and justifying it. Is this philosophically 
thinkable ? The only unity that satisfies the equa- 
tion seems to be a unity in absolute annihilation. 
If this is sound: — 

*^Much of the East has a religion that poetises 

* Obviously the Nirvana of common acceptance in the East, not 
the Nirvana of a few (chiefly Western) philosophers, in which 
individuality is in some sense conserved. 



240 W. E. FORD 

belief in ultimate cessation of being. (N.B. Dass 
admits this, but with reservations as to the mean- 
ing of the term ** being/' Don't think he escapes 
my conclusion.) 

' * If being is unity in difference ^ — the wider the 
ramification, given full co-ordination of parts and 
functions, the higher the perfection. {N.B, This 
necessarily makes perfection a relative, not an 
absolute term.) Then Nirvana, abolition of dif- 
ference, is abolition of being. 

''Unless these people, as Dass seems to imply, 
can sense some entirely different category of be- 
ing, quite unseizable by thought. (Nirvana is 
positive — ecstatic.) But if so, there is absolute 
cleavage between this sense and thought; i.e. 
thought is absolutely, not relatively, fallacious. 
Experience denies this. 

**It appears that the conception of Nirvana 
results from letting go of thought at the point 
where thought demands an uncomfortable degree 
of diversity; falling back upon an ideal of unity 
pure and simple {i.e. logically, unity of nothing 
with nothing in nothingness) ; and importing into 
this entirely hollow ideal a foreign content, de- 
rived from subconscious conviction of, or desire 
for, a happy ending to the story of life. 

^'ConcL: The East clings to the conception of 
unity at all costs ; we cling to individuation at all 
costs. Their penalty is a scale of life that cannot 

* Ford is here taking for granted a philosophical definition of 
being which is, I believe, his own; the following chapter will make 
its basis clear. 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 241 

proliferate beyond a certain point; ours, a blind, 
unordered proliferation that runs into culs-de- 
sac/' 

*'Hyp/' means hypothesis, **Obj." objection, 
and ^'Concl.'' conclusion — Ford's notes are freely 
interspersed with signposts of this kind, more il- 
luminating, perhaps, to those familiar with his 
ways of thought than to the casual reader. As 
is natural, his jottings are often scrappy and tan- 
talising (to use again the word that these note- 
books continually suggest) ; they mark, not real- 
isations, but only the raw material for realisa- 
tions ; but Ford always shows the lines upon which 
his thought is working. *^Dass," obviously, must 
have been some English-speaking Indian of his 
acquaintance, with whom he seems to have fallen 
into a discussion upon Oriental theology. It 
would be interesting to have full notes of that 
discussion. 

It will be clear, at any rate, that Ford's study 
of the civilised consciousness led him into a con- 
sideration, not only of the civilisations of other 
peoples, but of their philosophies and religions. 
He told me later, at the end of his first journey 
to the East (which took him, as it turned out, no 
further than India, where he found the material 
so inexhaustible that China had to wait), how he 
had consistently tried to keep his view objective ; 
and how persistently the conclusion was forced 
upon him that the root causes of varying civilised 
tendencies were subjective — that men developed 
their societies according to their cast of thought, 



«42 W. E. FORD 

and that their thought-moulds were, simply, their 
spiritual beliefs or disbeliefs. He went out in the 
modern, scientific spirit of investigation, pre- 
pared to see different ways of life explained by 
varying conditions of life ; he found himself more 
and more convinced that man moulds his circum- 
stances far more than his circumstances mould 
man. Ultimately, the machinery of a society did 
not explain the society. To discover the *'how'' 
was interesting in itself, but it threw no light 
upon the **why.'* The *Svhy'' of a civilisation, 
he suspected, depended at bottom upon nothing 
but the root philosophy, conscious or subcon- 
scious, of its component people. The question re- 
mained upon what causes that philosophy de- 
pended. Ford's provisional theory was that hu- 
man nature evolves a natural and a balanced 
philosophy of life of its own accord if nothing 
artificial steps in to hinder it in the process; in 
fact, that his investigation was not a search for 
the causes of a right social philosophy so muclj 
as for the origins of those checks and hindrances 
that make such a philosophy grow lopsided and 
unbalanced. 

Meanwhile he had formed a very strong con- 
viction upon the educational issue : that whatever 
our philosophy of social life is, we take far too 
little trouble to express it in clear terms, either 
for ourselves or for the rising generation. Our 
conception of civilisation is, he maintained, almost 
entirely subconscious ; and the result is that what- 
ever flaws exist in our social theory go undetected 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 24.3 

and are free to spread unregarded. We need, as 
Ford has written at the end of his Indian not^ 
book, *^to teach a coherent system of social phil- 
osophy in our schools.'' The Indian child at least 
learns the religious philosophy based upon the 
single, clear doctrine of the unity of all spirit — an 
anchorage for the social sense, though it is an an- 
chorage in a half-truth. 

The reason for our possessing no philosophy of 
social life Ford traced directly to our Western 
passion for individualism, for diversity of self- 
hood — the other, correlative half-truth, though we 
do not take the trouble to express it clearly to our- 
selves. We cannot teach a religion, because re- 
ligion is at the mercy of the sects, and each sect 
cares first and foremost for itself. We cannot 
teach social science, because social science is a 
matter of never-ending debate between political 
camps, and we fear bias on the part of teachers; 
ultimately, a political camp is more important to 
us than a political truth. This was the general 
line of Ford's analysis — not, it must be remem- 
bered, a considered judgment, but a stage in the 
process of thought upon which he had embarked. 

I was able to see very little of Ford at the time 
of his first return to England; my time was sel- 
dom my own, and Ford was much engaged with 
a project that began, I believe, at Mr. Wishart's 
suggestion, and certainly continued with his help. 
It might be described, in its effect though not in 
its expressed intention, as a scheme to dissem- 
inate Ford's educational ideals by the method of 



244 W. E.FORD 

peaceful penetration. Mr. Wishart was keen that 
Ford should begin to write upon education; not 
that he should produce a treatise, or even a text- 
book on method, but that he should submit articles 
on teaching to the educational papers, and try to 
instil the essence of his ideal into the world of 
educational thought. I think that, besides his real 
keenness for the effectual spread of Ford's views, 
Mr. Wishart was also plotting to give him an an- 
chorage in England, and to obviate, or at least 
postpone, the need of another expedition to 
strange and foreign places. Mr. Wishart was not 
among those who indulged in reprobation of 
Ford's journeyings, but he would have been glad 
to keep his son-in-law at home. 

Ford was not attracted by the idea of writing, 
as yet. His business at present, he said, was to 
take in rather than to give out; he did not want 
to write about the detail of education until he 
had recast his theory of education as a whole, 
and the recasting process depended upon that 
study of educational possibilities, in relation to 
our present phase of civilised life, which was now 
absorbing his energies. What he did need was 
to come more closely into touch with representa- 
tive people who, understanding sociology and poli- 
tics, were well disposed towards educational re- 
form; not that he might convert them, but that 
they might make more clear to him what were the 
opinions and the hopes of the best available minds. 
Mr. Wishart 's acquaintance with the world of the 
influential was enough to secure a number of in- 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 245 

troductions. I wish I could give a distinct ac- 
count of Ford's interviews with these distin- 
guished persons — some of them men who had 
much to do with the practical conduct of state 
affairs. But I had only one short talk with him 
on the subject, and a sketchy second-hand account 
of his impressions might do injustice to individual 
public servants who already have quite enough 
ill-informed criticism to put up with. But, to 
speak generally, Ford was depressed ; not by any 
ineptitude or lack of vision in the men with whom 
he talked, but by the obvious impossibility of their 
applying through public machinery more than a 
tiny fraction of the intellectual power and the 
idealism that they had it in them to give to the 
public service — and by their manifest resigna- 
tion to the fact. 

^^They can't give their real best,'' I remember 
Ford saying, ^^and they have given up trying." 
They were the victims, he went on, of the lazy 
English habit of making an opposition between 
the theoretical and the practical, with the result 
that a man sees what ought to be done, and then 
does not do it because there are difficulties in the 
way. No one but a fanatic. Ford said (the word 
* ^fanatic" was not, to him, a cheap term of abuse), 
could stand against our general tendency to call 
ourselves practical when we make difficulties a 
sufficient excuse for inaction. The politician, the 
public servant in general, could seldom be a fa- 
natic and remain a public servant; he could only 
drift down stream with the sluggish current, keep- 



W. E. FORD 

ing his slowly deteriorating principles to himself 
and becoming more and more a mere time-server 
in action. Some men could keep the fire of their 
original sincerity available, half -histrionically, for 
time-serving purposes; and these were the most 
dangerously misleading of all. 

Ford refused to blame the individuals in more 
than a very limited degree. In the common 
phrase, it was the system that was wrong; and at 
the back of the system was the common way of 
thought of the mass of '* educated'* people. It 
was unity of thought, he insisted, that was lack- 
ing; diversity of opinion was the chief practical 
obstacle to the carrying out of principles, and we 
made no study, educational or other, of the ways 
in which people of diverse opinions might arrive 
at a meeting of minds. Oriental minds had equally 
encountered am obstacle, and had found their 
unity in something little better than a common 
fatalism. Our resignation to the *^ practical'' dif- 
ficulties that come of divided counsels had, curi- 
ously enough, the same taint of fatalism. ^'The 
different forms of fatalism," Ford remarked, 
*'are the blind alleys of spiritual evolution." 

I gathered from Mrs. Ford that some of these 
eminent acquaintances of his were really inter- 
ested in his way of thought and anxious to see 
more of him; and perhaps a region of influence 
might have opened out before him, as Mr. Wish- 
art hoped, if their deed had been as good as their 
will. But a busy official, however idealistic his pri- 
vate views, only admires a prophet or a philos- 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY Ml 

opher on principle; he does not cultivate him in 
practice. He is committed to a way of life from 
which such indulgences are, in practice, crowded 
out. I do not think Ford was disappointed. He 
had seen enough for his present purposes of a 
type which he wanted to understand. He wanted 
now — he had been five months at home — to con- 
tinue his voyaging, and particularly to visit 
China. 

Ford's impressions of China, as they are re- 
corded in the note-books (I shall have but little 
other record to adduce), are at once peculiarly 
rich and, if the paradox will be understood, pe- 
culiarly vague. They show more than anything 
else his real reason for wishing to see outlandish 
civilisations in being, not merely to read what 
other observers had written about them — the fact, 
of which he must have been unconsciously aware, 
that by living for a time in any society of people 
he could absorb, through the pores of his skin 
as it were, more of the true, essential explanation 
of their social ethic than the trained literary in- 
terpreter could express in many volumes. He 
told me once that he could learn more about the 
soul of Japan from one slight story of Lafcadio 
Hearn's telling than from all the Japanese his- 
tory that is extant, though Hearn is admittedly 
an inaccurate reporter; and I think the reason 
is that Hearn, like Ford, possessed a certain im- 
aginative sympathy which could enter into direct 
communication with the inner social sense of a 
people, disregarding the multiplicity of detail that 



248 W. E. FORD 

only obscures the vision of the more pedestrian 
if more painstaking investigator. At all events 
Ford's China, like Hearn's Japan, seems to me 
a real place, queer but intelligible ; the China and 
the Japan of the careful European historian 
seem, by comparison, a fantastic myth. All of 
this goes to support a contention of Ford's that 
reality, for the mind, depends not upon facts in 
themselves, but upon the imaginative understand- 
ing of facts. Ford took in a few facts at first 
hand, and understood them, and arrived at a real 
interpretation of China; the historical commenta- 
tors who had made a life's study of China gath- 
ered in many facts, chiefly at second or third 
hand, and did not understand them, and produced 
a Chinese fairy tale. But let me give another ex- 
tract from the note-books : — 

^ * The most exciting thing about this civilisation, 
from the modern European point of view, is that 
it has had no industrial revolution — not as an 
entire civilisation. India had; though the wind 
has been tempered to the Indian masses to a great 
extent. (Had Europe to bear the first and hard- 
est brunt because Europe alone was so far ad- 
vanced in strength as only to sag perilously, not 
actually to break, under the onslaught?) Dis- 
counting the Oriental isolation of the unity ideal 
— the Oriental fatalism — China is what Europe 
was before steam and rails came in. 

^'Hyp. Suppose industrialism were now fully 
introduced into China, as into Japan, this would 
be the result: machinery, the whole complex 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 249 

mechanism of industrial relations, would come in- 
to being among a people whose way of thought, 
ingrained by centuries upon centuries of routine, 
would make them utterly incapable of interpreting 
it. They would not control the machine; the ma- 
chine would control them. And their fatalism 
would make it seem right to them that a machine 
should take on this supremacy. 

^*Did anything so very different happen when 
industrialism made its swift conquest of Europe? 
We had our own fatalism — our belief in the ab- 
solute and sole necessity of individuation ; and the 
Manchester School was the consequence. Let 
diversity of industrial interest have free play, we 
said ; unity of interest will settle itself. In other 
words, let unity of industrial interest go hang. 
The Chinaman would say, in effect. This great 
Spirit of Machinery has taken hold of us and pos- 
sessed us; it is no use for us, mere cogs in its 
wheels, to protest. In other words, let the work- 
ing individual go hang. On this hypothesis the 
result in the two cases is curiously the same. 

'^Conf} Factory workers in Nanchong seem to 
show exactly the pessimism and the resignation of 
English sweated operatives. The difference is in 
the mode of relief : the Englishman takes gin and 
becomes, fallaciously, a free-born Briton again; 
the Chinaman takes opium and identifies himself 
with *the circumambient inane.' To the one, a 
false individuation — to the other, a false sense of 
his unity with everything. 

^Confirmation (of the hypothesis). 



250 W. E. FORD 

^* (No — not wholly false. Stolen, rather; stolen 
from the man's inner consciousness. He is living, 
at these moments, upon his spiritual capital.) 

^^ Compare Chinese peasantry, now, with Eng- 
lish peasantry before the industrial revolution. 
Discounting the vast difference between their 
views of what is ultimately important, their life, 
in detail, is much of a muchness. The elementary 
fact that the people depend on the land, and the 
land on the people, is at the root of the people's 
contentment and the land's fecundity. Imagine 
the mass of Chinese peasantry swept into the in- 
dustrial vortex, and you imagine an incalculable 
upheaval and uprooting. That upheaval and up- 
rooting has happened to us ; it is wonderful that 
we are not in a worse mess than we are." 

No specimen from Ford's note-books can render 
the cumulative effect that the whole mass of his 
notes has for me, who knew his way of thinking, 
and can see the relation between his small, subtly 
casual allusions and the general trend of his 
thought. The above quotation, now that I have 
copied it into my manuscript, seems vague and 
purposeless out of its context — which is the haunt- 
ing meaning that the whole body of his notes dim- 
ly conveys to me. The notes in themselves, as 
detailed excerpts, such as the two that I have 
given, have comparatively little meaning. Ford 
put these jottings down for his own eye — they 
were to be his raw material when he came to 
write his book, and he deliberately put them down 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 251 

in the raw. But perhaps the reader will have 
both the patience and the insight to see in them, 
at least, the movement of a mind that always 
looked through seemings to realities, and lived for 
the true concerns of life. 

I make no attempt to portray Ford's impres- 
sions of India and China^ — those romantically pic- 
turesque civilisations — in their picturesque aspect. 
It was not that aspect that concerned him. He 
wanted to arrive at the truth about these civilisa- 
tions as it affects, or should affect, our own ide^. 
of civilisation. I do not profess to give his con- 
clusions ; those he could only have worked out for 
himself. I only hope to give a hint, and a very 
slight hint, of his working. The tragedy is that 
he himself was not permitted to work out his 
conclusions in full. 

He came home from China, as from India, not 
because material was exhausted — far from it — 
but because he seemed to have been long enough 
away. And he came back resolved to go out 
again, presently, to Japan — the country where 
East and West have met in an alliance closer and 
more baffling to the mind than can be discovered 
in any other corner of the globe. ^^ Understand 
Japan,'' he said to me, ^*and you understand the 
whole of the modern world." Japan, he went on 
to say, would probably show itself to be a crude 
mixture of Eastern and Western influences; but 
there one ought to see, not by any means a new 
and a perfected civilisation, but the embryo of a 
civilisation begotten by the West upon the East. 



«52 W. E. FORD 

He did not look to Japan as an ideal, but rather, 
almost, as an exemplary warning. It might be 
the privilege of the Japanese to show us all how 
not to do it; in any case, he meant to find out. 

This time his stay in London was a short one 
— less than two months ; and he gave all his time 
to his wife and children. It was only because he 
wanted to be with them again that he had come 
home. It is amusing that one of the friends who 
most deplored his absences abroad was highly 
scandalised at his extravagance in undertaking a 
journey home for so short a period. It was not 
that he could not afford it, nor even that he was 
spending Mrs. Ford's money — if it had been any 
business of his friends to speculate upon these 
questions — it was simply the uncomfortable sense 
of a disproportion between the length and cost 
of a journey home from the East and back and a 
stay in England of merely a few weeks. The 
value of those weeks was not to be measured by 
their number ; and they were destined to be a very 
precious memory to those for whose sake he re- 
turned. 

I saw Ford twice during this time ; and at our 
first meeting he was full of humorous comments 
upon his friend's letter of expostulation. It was 
part, he said, of the eternal discussion whether 
things are more square than they are pink. The 
expense of his journey represented one value; the 
happiness of a domestic reunion represented an- 
other and a wholly different value, as different as 
the quality of pinkness is from the quality of 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 253 

squareness. People were for ever trying to 
measure incommensurable things against one an- 
other, especially to translate into terms of quan- 
tity things that can only be estimated in terms of 
quality. He said that he saw himself, during his 
stay in England, in the character of Lewis Car- 
roll's engine-driver, whose time was worth a thou- 
sand pounds a minute. In his own case, the actual 
value of a minute or an hour or a day of his pres- 
ence at home to himself, to his wife, to either of 
his children, was absolutely unmeasurable, even 
in terms of quality, by any one outside the fam- 
ily; but when you had a value widely accepted 
and in a sense understood by the public, its ex- 
pression in terms of quantity might be just as im- 
possible. Ford adduced the case of a short poem 
in the evening paper which he had brought home 
with him, a little lyric in two four-line stanzas, 
full, he declared, of the true creative spirit. (The 
poet's name was unknown to me, as to Ford; not 
long ago I came upon the verses again, in a vol- 
ume now cherished by those who have a seeing 
eye for modern poetry, as the work of a master of 
delicate fantasy in rhyme. ^) Ford held out the 
sheet. '^What is this worth, in terms of quan- 
tity?'' he asked. ^^Fourpence a line — four eights 
are thirty-two — two and eight pence." As to the 
real value in terms of quality, who could judge? 
The thrill of pleasure that it had given to us was 
a spark from the authentic fires of poetry; but, 
again, it might be a spark that would gleam for a 

* Walter de la Mare. 



254 W. E. FORD 

little and die out, a small shooting star in an 
August sky, or it might be a new fixed star among 
the hosts in the poetic firmament, to be registered 
upon the charts of astronomer-critics of poetry 
for as long as word-constellations in our language 
should endure. In the lesser event, even, its value 
could be gauged by no quantitative foot-rule of 
any one^s devising. *^The qualitative is the abso- 
lute,'' said Ford; a saying upon which I have 
often reflected since this talk, and always with a 
feeling that Ford is tantalising me again — that a 
world of meaning lies behind the phrase, of mean- 
ing which Ford ought to have lived to elucidate 
more fully. At all events, I feel certain that the 
converse of his statement is true : that the quan- 
titative is the impermanent — that anything which 
can be weighed and measured in terms of quan- 
tity is of its nature fleeting, and of its nature un- 
satisfying to the spirit of man. The quantitative 
is, by definition, the finite. 

The second time that I saw Ford during this 
return to England, and the last time that I was to 
talk with him before his departure for Japan, 
was within a week of his sailing. I was preoccu- 
pied with my own concerns. I had the choice be- 
fore me of two careers ; the one ambitious, in the 
sense in which ambition means the seeking of 
money, the other artistic, in the sense in which 
art means the satisfaction of one's own inner 
needs. I laid my position — of which the details 
need not concern the reader^ — ^before Ford. The 
result of the otherwise unimportant incident was 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 255 

that Ford gave me his mind about the perennial 
conflict in the estimation of a youngish man be- 
tween ideals and practical necessities, in terms 
which ought, I think, to be definitely stated and 
underlined, though the attempt to restate the prin- 
ciples that Ford could express and illustrate with 
such easy power is an undertaking full of diffi- 
culty. 

To begin with, he insisted that all conflict be- 
tween the ideal and the necessary is unnatural 
conflict. It is of the same nature as the opposi- 
tion between the theoretical and the practical. 
None the less, that unnatural opposition, that un- 
natural conflict is continually present in our civil- 
isation : we must never forget that it is there, but 
we must never forget that it is unnatural. Ford 
imagined as an instance the case of an artist, a 
literary man, who wants to write literature of 
one kind, while his agent or publisher, represent- 
ing the public taste, wants him to write literature 
(if it be literature) of another kind. His artistic 
sense demands that he should write what he wants 
to write, and his artistic sense is wrong, to this 
extent: it is also his business to say what other 
people want, or need, to have said. Real art is 
never born of the artistic sense alone; it springs 
from a fusion of the artistic with the social sense. 
Undoubtedly the artist often knows best, not what 
is merely wanted, but w^hat is truly needed; but 
that is not because of his artistic sense alone, but 
because his social sense is often finer than that 
of his agent or publisher — in whom artistic and 



256 W. E. FORD 

social ideals are alike merged in some degree in 
commercial considerations. 

A writer, so Ford declared, has no need to com- 
promise between his artistic conscience and the 
need for making money. Indeed, as a rule, he 
only falls between two stools if he tries to do so. 
What he needs is not a compromise, but a unity; 
and that not between art and money-making, but 
between art and an understanding of the people 
to whom the art must speak. Money-making must 
be incidental. ^^If an artist tries to aim straight 
at money,'' said Ford, '^he will miss it. The pull 
of his art will deflect his aim." 

Under the vague term ' ' artist ' ' Ford tended to 
include all those who follow a given activity sim- 
ply and solely for its own sake. The others were 
those who had fame or money for their chief ob- 
jective. The desire for fame in itself — apart 
from the desire for recognition and love from 
those for whom one has worked — he regarded as 
a disease of the mind, instancing the number of 
great seekers after fame who have been epileptics. 
A desire for money, on the other hand, was often 
worthy of entire respect. In a perfect civilisa- 
tion, he said, we should all do our work for its 
own sake and for the sake of our neighbours, 
and our material reward would come incidentally ; 
in civilisation as it is, the animal law of a strug- 
^'le for existence is only very partially super- 
seded, and most of the money that is the agreed 
token for food, shelter, and security is scrambled 
for rather than earned. This being so. Ford was 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 257 

clear that the element of scramble must be al- 
lowed for — and kept in its proper place. The 
trouble was, as Ford said, that there appeared 
to be a law of ' * once a scrambler, always a scram- 
bler '*; the world might be roughly divided into 
scramblers, earners, and artists, all remaining 
fairly true to type. 

The difficulty was to know when to stop scram- 
bling. Almost every one had the right instinct 
about this; almost every one said to himself, ^^I 
need so much for security; I will make so much 
and then stop.'' And almost every one, succeed- 
ing in the money-scramble, found himself unable 
to stop. Ford put this down to two causes. First, 
^* scrambling'' satisfies an instinct older than hu- 
manity, the instinct developed through aeons of 
evolution through struggle; and the appetite of 
that instinct grows with exercise. Second, there 
is the difficulty of persuading the stopping-place 
to remain fixed. A man aims at a modest £300 
a year. Starting from the basis of a very simple 
way of life, he sees £300 a year as, upon that 
basis, a comfortable assurance of security. But 
unless he is a person of great simplicity, or of 
great determination and fixity of purpose, his 
basis, his scale of life, rises with every increase 
in his income; and when he has his £300 a year 
he is already living on a £300 a year basis, and 
thinks how pleasant it would be to feel really com- 
fortable and secure — ^with an income of, say, £600 
a year. And so the process goes on, without limit ; 
and so. Ford considered, it was likely to go on 



258 W. E. FORD 

until society should take account of the sound in- 
stinct for moderation with which most people en- 
ter upon a money-making career, and should give 
it expression by setting a limit to wealth, thus 
protecting the individual against his own lower 
instincts. 

This, I suggested, would abolish capitalism — 
would it not involve a mechanical State-Socialism? 
Possibly, Ford thought, not at all necessarily. 
Private ownership had had its use, he thought. 
The time had already come when an industry 
could be owned entirely by small shareholders 
and managed by salaried experts. Possibly, in 
the future, the workers would become the share- 
holders — and the shareholder class, through an 
education that would rouse the mass of the genteel 
out of idleness and apathy, would become work- 
ers as well. That, he was inclined to think, would 
be in the long run the solution of the industrial 
problem; but it would be a very long run. By 
that time industry would have become an art, and 
grab and scramble would have been quite super- 
seded; a consummation desirable enough in all 
conscience, but not likely to come about in a gen- 
eration or two. 

This was the last talk that I had with Ford. He 
sailed for Japan in the spring of 1913. For some 
Vv eeks after his landing there his letters were dis- 
patched regularly every mail, as usual; and as 
usual they told Mrs. Ford of little but his actual 
movements — he was never a descriptive letter- 
writer, and he seldom mentioned the progress of 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 259 

his investigations, keeping this material for his 
note-books and for conversation when he should 
return. He seldom wrote to any one but his wife, 
and, occasionally, his elder girl; and he wrote 
rather as husband and father than as travelle-- 
and thinker. Mrs. Ford alloAvs me to publish a 
part of one brief letter, which has only the sad 
distinction of being his last : — 

''This is a quiet little up-conntrv villas'e. I have 
got all that I can hold for the present out of the tovvns 
and the English-speaking Japs, and I want to get tlie 
atmosphere of the un-Europeanised rustic life. Doing 
without an interpreter already, with results that strain 
the splendiferous native courtesy at times. Jolly quar- 
ters, with a fine view — I'm seeing plenty of it, being 
tied by the leg with a chill of sorts — getting better now, 
after a couple of days' fever. I really wished you were 
here the day before yesterday! ..." 

After this letter, silence. Ford had always writ- 
ten by every mail, and when two mails had passed 
with no further w^ord from him, Mrs. Ford was 
anxious enough to have word sent, provisionally, 
to the British Consul at Tokyo, asking that in- 
quiries might be made unless a cable from her 
should have let him know meanwhile that all was 
well. Still no news arriving, she cabled to the 
consul on the day when the information sent by 
mail was due to reach him, asking that inquiries 
should be pushed forward without delay. There 
followed another fortnight of suspense, and then 
the answering cable arrived. Ford had died and 



260 W. E. FORD 

had been buried several weeks before in the little 
village from which he had last written. 

Confirmatory details by the mail following the 
cable told little more. The foreign visitor had 
been stricken down by a fever, had rallied 
strongly, and then had had a quick and fatal re- 
lapse. The village people had guarded his few 
possessions, and these were being sent home. 
(Ultimately only his pocket-book, sent separately 
by registered mail, arrived; the thing of most 
value, the notes that he had had time to make in 
Japan, were lost with the main consignment, no 
one could tell how.) There was no hint of any 
final note or message; at Mrs. Ford's request the 
envoy from the Consulate made a second journey 
to the village to make sure of this, and learned 
that Ford had passed from a return of high fever 
into unconsciousness, from which he did not 
awaken. 

I believe that Ford died with many secrets 
locked, half-solved, in his mind, many half- 
worked problems whose solution would have 
brought him widespread gratitude among thinking 
people. It is part of my sorrow to be able to pre- 
sent only so slight and vague a hint even of the 
nature of the great undertaking in the midst of 
which he was cut off. This was to have been the 
practical outcome, the practical service, of his 
essential philosophy, his essential view of man 
and of the universe. Of that philosophy itself, so 
far as Beresford and I have been able to recon- 
struct it from our memory of his casual exposi- 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 261 

tions (Beresford was fortunate in having one 
really exhaustive talk with him about it), the next 
chapter will give some account. Of the man I 
will attempt no concluding panegyric; the mem- 
ory of his inner nature is the sacred possession 
of those who have lost him. 



PART THREE 
A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 



PART THREE 
A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 

CHAPTER XI 

Richmond and I are in disagreement concerning 
what appears to be an essential of Ford's philos- 
ophy, but I believe that our very quarrel demon- 
strates the validity of the principle that provides 
my thesis. Richmond loved Ford the man. He 
admired the structure of Ford's character and the 
rule of his life. Richmond saw results and found 
an application; he was satisfied as to the prag- 
matic test of the philosophy, and while he would 
not for a moment admit that pragmatism is a phi- 
losophy in itself, he has found in it a useful tool. 
Just in so far as our present partnership is con- 
cerned he represents the active exponent. It is 
he who has written Ford's life, who has had some 
vision of a teleology and has translated his sub- 
ject into comprehensible terms. My share, as 
represented in this final chapter, imposes upon me 
a task that must be less sympathetic to the ordi- 
nary reader. 

And I must premise, further, that I cannot at- 
tempt a dogmatic exposition of Ford's philoso- 

265 



^66 W. E. FORD 

phy. He never himself formulated it in philosoph- 
ical terms, and although I may lapse into that 
shortland from a characteristic inability to find 
the illuminating paraphrase, I propose to confine 
myself as far as possible to the instrument of 
common language understood by the plain man. 
Ford had the same difficulty. I have before me 
at this moment a letter that he wrote to me when 
I was living at Parks tone in the summer of 1905, 
and I quote a passage here as the true apology 
for my method. ^*I am confoundedly bothered 
by my search for terms,'' he writes apropos of 
the philosophical consolation he was prescribing 
for my mental depression, '^and I don't want to 
sit down and invent a new terminology. So you 
must be sympathetic with me and not allow the 
prejudice of old associations to bias you if yoii 
find me talking of ''spirit" and ''matter," for 
example. I shall only be using them as conveni- 
ent little labels like the placards of the Eliza- 
bethan stage." 

It follows, therefore, firstly, that my statement 
will be of no value to the specialist ; and secondly, 
that I may have received a faulty impression of 
Ford's philosophy, and may pass on a second ren- 
dering which will be still more distorted. This 
resort to the language of pictures, the language 
so sedulously avoided in definition by the aca- 
demic philosopher, inevitably touches too various 
a response in the imaginations of different read- 
ers. When the placard goes up, "This is a Cas- 



A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 267 

tie," the average spectator responds according 
to his experience, and pictures not an ideal pile 
of his own construction, but the Windsor or Ken- 
ilworth of his last excursion, the flat presentation 
of a familiar engraving, or the memory of a real- 
istic backcloth. And as I, too, may have substi- 
tuted Windsor for Ford's Kenilworth, and may 
succeed in nothing more than creating the impres- 
sion of a drop scene, I feel cautiously inclined to 
warn all whom it may comjern that my exegesis, 
no less than my personal impression of the phi- 
losopher himself, is coloured by my own tenden- 
cies. 

Lastly, the problem is still more complicated 
by the fact that Ford's main proposition is as 
pure an essay in a priorism as I ever came across. 
When he first began to hint at his philosophy to 
me, in 1904, he had not read Bergson ; but he had 
completely anticipated the method of intuition 
prescribed in the Introduction to Metaphysics. 
Hence his preliminary thesis is founded on no 
sort of inductive process, and may appear at first 
sight to contradict the empirical and pragmatic 
tests of social benefit. . . . 

But my apology is accumulating beyond the 
limits of necessity ; and having qualified it by add- 
ing that my attempt at reproducing Ford's phi- 
losophy also rests mainly upon an intuition, I 
will struggle to find symbols that shall render as 
nearly as may be my own reflection of the orig- 
inal. 

I do not propose to find names for Ford's phi- 



268 W. E. FORD 

losophy. It does not matter greatly whether we 
call it broadly a form of Vitalism, or bring it into 
a more definite category under the heading of 
Idealistic Monism. Indeed, I am not sure whether 
or not Ford regarded matter as a reflex of spirit, 
or as a second elementary. I incline to the for- 
mer hypothesis. In his talk of matter, when he 
ranged beyond the last-known fence of molecular 
physics, he implied a theory of impeded, tempo- 
rarily crystallised force as the ultimate atom. I 
remember receiving an impression of the *'knot 
in the ether,'' in unmaterial terms, as force con- 
fined by its own superabundance of energy, as 
some indefinable element piling up to visibility. 
But as I attempt to translate the intuition the 
matter inevitably becomes temporal and spatial, 
and it seems that no other figure is possible. 

Nevertheless, I believe that we are approaching 
some expression of that hypothecated urgency be- 
hind life. The academic philosophers have had 
their uses. They have trained the mind to disso- 
ciate itself from the concrete example. And if 
no academic philosophy has yet succeeded in for- 
mulating any idea of a ^^ first cause," many phi- 
losophers have helped us to clear the field of 
thought. 

I like to think that we are feeling our way to a 
new form in this kind. Bergson has failed us in 
many respects, but he has come nearer than any 
waiter of my generation to carry the statement of 
his thesis into the domain of poetry. His work 
has, in fact, what Mr. Eansome would call a po- 



A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 269 

tential value. Behind many of his passages in 
Creative Evolution lies a power of suggestion 
that is more valuable than the logical demonstra- 
tion. And it is for this reason that all his many 
exegetes have failed to do more than confuse our 
hopeful vision of his principles. Bergson's logic 
carries us no further than the logic of Hegel, but 
Bergson's statement tends to display a new pos- 
sibility. When logic and mathematics and the 
language of accuracy can carry us no further, 
poetry, music, and even the graphic arts may com- 
plete the expression. 

So, too, in these haphazard notes on Ford's 
theory of causation, I can only hope to convey 
some vague, embracing impression of that postu- 
lated first cause which has found such other names 
and such other significances as God, the First 
Cause, the Life Force, the Elan Vital, or, as I 
unthinkingly put it, the urgency behind life — a 
definition that I should be sorry to defend phOo- 
sophically. I use it, now, neither poetically nor 
scientifically, but because it satisfied my need as 
I wrote it, and I hope that it may by its very 
vagueness and inaccuracy serve my purpose of 
avoiding the over definite. 

To Ford this urgency was all *^good" in the 
sense that it was beyond criticism in its essence, 
however various in expression; and his first and 
most important principle was that right thinking, 
judgment and action are attained only by permit- 
ting the freest possible expression of the tenden- 



270 W. E. FORD 

cies tliat seek to manifest themselves as a libera- 
tion of this antecedent urge. 

In the parable of force piling itself up till it 
becomes comprehensible as matter, we find our 
Ormuzd in liberation, our Ahriman in impediment 
or constriction. So in the moral analogy, free ex- 
pression presents an aspect of right; judgment 
and inhibition an aspect of wrong. Consequently, 
right and wrong are never absolutes, but only de- 
grees of resistance. 

It follows as a kind of corollary to this that 
each check or impediment to the free expression 
of this active urgency behind life remains tem- 
porarily as a further complex that must ultimately 
be resolved. I remember that on one occasion 
Ford took up the old analogy of the river, postu- 
lating that one must not think of the current as 
a movement of particles, but as an abstract force 
thrusting forward, a force that must not be con- 
fused in this instance with any physical theory of 
gravity. In that metaphor the impediments took 
the shape of the whirlpools and eddies, and for 
a time he elaborated the figure and made me see 
how each vortex must be resolved, each resist- 
ance overcome, by the ultimate force of a stream 
of energy that could be momentarily diverted but 
never, even momentarily, checked. I had a fleet- 
ing vision of some eternal persistence whose di- 
rection and temporality could only be measured by 
the ephemeral whirlpool it created. And then 
Ford dismissed the whole mataphor with one 
sweeping movement of his arm. *^It's just one 



A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 271 

figure out of a million," he said; 'Hhe only point 
of it is to show that any figure one may choose 
has the same interpretation." 

But if that remark of his is true, it does, in- 
deed, contain some element of proof. If we can 
find evidence of the same theory in every material 
illustration, we may logically accept the theory 
on the mere ground of probability ; we are in sight 
of a hypothesis that explains all the phenomena. 

In a somewhat inconsequent series of notes 
such as this, anything like a general argument 
would be out of place. I can only suggest and 
leave the immense range of extensions and ob- 
jections to those who are willing to work in the 
cause of truth. Nevertheless, I must pause for a 
moment to point out that in certain applications 
Ford's general theory does help us to plainer 
statement. 

The theological problem of the origin of evij, 
for example, is resolved into simpler terms. Ex 
hypothesi, this primitive urge is non-moral, and 
whatever appears to us as evil is only an instance 
of a degree of temporary impediment. On the 
other hand, if we push the problem further back, 
and inquire whence came the first hindrance, 
whence the original superfluity that became trans- 
lated into matter, we may find some explanation 
and satisfaction in the contemplation of our prin- 
ciple as at once rhythmic and eternal. We may 
think of it as some immeasurable wave that pulses 
for ever, without origin or climax; and we, the 
infinitely small presentation of a human resultant, 



272 W. E. FORD 

may find ourselves at a node of accumulation, 
buoying ourselves with the certainty of a heaven 
of present expansion. 

For the amplitude of our imagined wave is so 
vast that it may contain the birth, growth, and 
dissolution of a universe. In one great throb of 
our single element, matter may come into being, 
pass through its myriad forms of presentation and 
dissolve again into the serenity of the All-thing 
that is, in its essence, immutable. No concep- 
tion of our material time is great enough to meas- 
ure such a cycle. ^ Our little measure of revolu- 
tion about a central sun must be so indefinitely 
multiplied that the human mind must forget that 
unit before the larger conception can be realised. 
And if the unit grow to the passing of a solar sys- 
tem, it is still too small to reckon the comparative 
eternity of a single movement of our primary ele- 
ment. Yet now, and with one effortless turn of 
the imagination, the reckoning can be made if we 
do but grasp the thought that by its extension all 
time may be eliminated; drowned in the greater 
infinity as the thought of a single second is 
drowned in the conception of a million years. 
That is as far, perhaps, as we may reach towards 
our elimination of the concept of time, while we 
are still so confronted and harassed by this per- 
petual cage of matter. But if the method fail to 
achieve its ultimate object, namely, the complete 

* I write the word ' ' cycle ' ' deliberately, since in this relation I 
may change the metaphor without apology. The figure is in- 
essential. The All-thing embraces every forni, while for ever 
remaining itself formless. 



A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 273 

elimination of the time measure, it may serve, as 
philosophy has served, to dissociate the mind from 
a concrete example. 

Indeed I would find my excuse for this picture- 
language in a continual clash of metaphor. If 
a single image is chosen and elaborated, it tends 
to crystallise as the idea in itself. But if we have 
no sooner pictured a stream than we find the 
thought of it changed to a wave, to a wheel, to a 
measure of time, we have some hope of momen- 
tarily touching the abstract as a result of our 
confusion. Just in this manner do our thoughts 
often reach out more profoundly when a demand 
is made upon our immediate attention. In con- 
versation, while we are reading, in the midst of 
some active employment, the vividly enticing ided: 
will often present itself, and we long for instant 
freedom in order that the idea may be wooed to 
fuller expression. But when the distraction is 
removed, when we have escaped it may be our 
companion or even quickly laid down our book, 
some magic is gone from our thought, the wonder 
slips from us, and that which had been for a mo- 
ment vital and entrancing becomes the flat simu- 
lacrum projected by a labouring imagination. 

And for this reason I have a hope that among 
the torturing clash of metaphors, the mind of the 
reader may find some moment of escape ; and ap- 
proach, if only for the tiniest instant, the idea of 
that shapeless, timeless abstraction which was 
Ford's intuition of the primary urge behind life. 

I come to a second application of his theory — 



274 W. E. FORD 

and it shall be my only other instance — by way 
of the problem of evolution. 

When the theologists presented our element in 
the shape of God, and gave Him the human quali- 
ties of pity, mercy, and gentleness, they were 
sorely hampered to explain the apparent cruelty 
not only of that expression we have labelled Na- 
ture, but also of the incongruous tragedies of hu- 
man fate. By one of those convincing fallacies 
which have something in common with my sliding 
metaphors of the All-thing, they came to postulate 
that the ways of God were inscrutable, while at- 
tempting still to retain those essentially scrutable 
characteristics of pity and mercy with which they 
had anthropomorphically endowed him. God be- 
came to us, therefore, a horrible paradox of cruel 
kindness, and from that our puzzled imaginations 
were reduced to contemplating human sin as a 
kind of Absolute that might perhaps be elimi- 
nated by punishment. The thought of our own 
abasement gave a more plausible colour to the 
inscrutable fury of God. If we could attain no 
such high conception of His purity as should ele- 
vate Him beyond all possibility of criticism, we 
might reach towards the same effect by lowering 
our measure of human virtue. The older theolo- 
gists sought, in fact, to approve God by debasing 
the standard of their regard of Him. 

Ford, in all his tests of the All-thing, steadily 
refused to humanise it. Cruelty no less than kind- 
ness was to him a mode of motion, a function, 
a phenomenon, that we judge by the present stan- 



A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 275 

dard of humanity in a particular stage of evolu- 
tion. He found no absolute criterion in any of 
these qualities. Right and wrong were relatives 
of immediate worth, but they had for him no such 
intrinsic qualities as marked them out for ulti- 
mate permanence. Indeed, if I were asked to 
state his absolutes in this kind, I could only label 
them as Obstruction and Liberation — a definition 
that I will consider later when I come to the ques- 
tion of his practical ethic. 

And it seems to me that if we regard the large 
problem of evolution from this attitude, all those 
vague questions concerning waste and superfluity, 
the apparent regard for the type, and the reckless 
cruelty to the individual; all those queries of pur- 
pose and morality which strain towards an accept- 
able teleology, become suddenly futile or incapable 
of an immediate solution. I do not find Ford's 
primitive urge inscrutable if I cease to regard it 
as the creation of a human mind. The All-thing 
is not made in man's image, and man is no more 
than a mode of expression for the All-thing. And 
if with our limitations we seek some definite hope, 
some goal at which we may momentarily gaze 
in this flitting instant of our long journey, we 
may find it in newer words than Heaven and Hell ; 
in such words as obstruction and liberation, or 
in the thought of a passage from conflict towards 
peace. 

But all the particular problems connected with 
man's present moral, intellectual, and physical 
condition will surround us when we leave the 



276 W. E. FORD 

freedom of our unlocateable a priori standpoint 
and look back at our insurgent premiss through 
the circumscriptions of that empirical pragma- 
tism which appears to be the accepted criterion 
of social values. There is, indeed, another crite- 
rion, and, perhaps, a more important one, I mean 
the intuitions of that genius which is the gift in 
a greater or less degree of all humanity. But for 
what we call practical purposes, every inspiration 
that touches the regulations of social life must be 
submitted to the final test of ^^Will it workr' In 
the temporal, spatial domain which encloses the 
material complex in a delicate, strong net of very 
urgent restrictions, it is inevitable that we should 
attach a considerable importance to the more or- 
derly arrangement of molecules. 

Before I come to those immediate concerns of 
life, however, I must deal briefly with an inter- 
mediate problem arising out of the main premiss 
and subsidiary to it ; a problem that leaves us still 
outside the net. Ford's second a priori proposi- 
tion deals with the subject of consciousness. 

His statement differs most importantly from 
the statements of such philosophers as, say, Wil- 
liam James, inasmuch as Ford touches a greater 
unity. James spoke of an *^ ocean of conscious- 
ness, '^ and either that or any other metaphor of 
the same kind presents the antinomies of ^^ spirit'* 
and ^^ matter '* — even if the matter, as James 
seemed to imply, is held in suspension. Ford did 
not haggle over degrees of permeability. He pos- 
tulated consciousness as a universal property of 



A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 277 

what we call matter, and drew his differentiating 
line, not between consciousness and unconscious- 
ness, but between consciousness and the poten- 
tiality for its realisation. 

At first sight his theory of that scale of poten- 
tiality may appear as nothing more than a piece 
of ingenuity, but when the theory is put to the 
widest test of analogy, it gains immense force by 
the appeal of its application. Ford's key-word 
in this connection was *^ Reciprocity.'' He pos- 
tulated that the degree of realisation necessary 
for the understanding of what we speak of broad- 
ly as consciousness, is proportionate to the de- 
gree of reciprocity between the units of conscious- 
ness. (I deplore the material significance of the 
word ' * unit, ' ' but each and every synonym is open 
to the same objection. We have, unfortunately, 
no comprehensible language with which to meas- 
ure such abstractions as this; and ''unit" has the 
advantage of carrying less suggestion of solidity 
than such alternatives as molecule or atom.) 

For the sake of illustration our unit may be 
figured as some minimum translation of the omni- 
present thrust into spatial expression. We might, 
indeed, express it by an algebraical formula, for, 
when we enter the net, the chief of our restric- 
tions is imposed by a fundamental mathematical 
process working within three or at most four 
dimensions ; a restriction that is imposed upon all 
would-be definitive language. We may, however, 
accept the word ''unit" as a reasonably flexible 
description. 



278 W. E. FORD 

It is far harder to attempt a definition of * ^ re- 
ciprocity,'* a word that in this connection includes 
and correlates a whole host of values. It must, 
I think, include love for example at one end, while 
at the other it might express the mechanical re- 
lations of the transmitter and receiver of a Mar- 
coni apparatus. We may, perhaps, hold the idea 
of reciprocity as a potential function of the unit, 
and find instances of the function in phenomena 
apparently so diverse as telepathy and chenaical 
affinities. 

Ford's main premiss with regard to conscious- 
ness now emerges as the postulate that the ten- 
dency of all the known manifestations of reciproc- 
ity was towards the realisation of consciousness. 
He sometimes found a statement of his antino- 
mies in this proposition by using the chemical 
terms crystalloid and colloid, the former repre- 
senting the more static, and the latter the more 
fluid forms of cohesion. And in this figure he 
further assumed that the static represented the 
more obstructive complex, while the fluid was the 
more susceptible instrument that was evolving 
more rapidly towards the ideal of expression. 

Nevertheless, in this as in his figures of the 
primitive urge behind life, all statements must be 
accepted as presenting a material analogy which 
cannot be pressed too far. And later, when I 
come to his theory of ^^ tenuity'' in connection 
with what is commonly called genius, I shall have 
occasion to elaborate, by a more biological paral- 
lel, the peculiar application of such symbols as 



A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 279 

'* crystalloid'* and '* colloid'*; symbols that stood 
to him as portraying the increasing diversity be- 
tween the inorganic and the organic forms of 
life. For the immediate purpose of these notes, 
however, I shall accept the main argument as hav- 
ing been stated in the formula I have adopted, 
and proceed to an explanatory illustration of the 
theory with no further apology for any abrupt 
transition of metaphor. Two terms, alone, will 
remain constant, namely that of *^unit" and that 
of *' reciprocity, * * both of which have been, in 
some sense, defined. 

An illustration of Ford's that gave me a sense 
of apprehension, when I first tentatively strug- 
gled with his exposition of consciousness, took 
for its unit the high exponent of individual life. 
The thing we know as a group consciousness, he 
said, does very evidently depend on the degree of 
reciprocity between individuals. But beyond the 
small group we come to a still more imperfect 
form in a national consciousness; while a world 
consciousness can hardly be said to exist. The 
differences being fairly attributable to the dimin- 
ishing potentiality for reciprocity. 

In the small, more or less selected group, for 
example, such as the congregation of a revivalist 
preacher, the sitters at a spiritualistic seamce, or 
the crowd at a public meeting, a temporary de- 
gree of reciprocity is attained by the attention 
given to a central theme. The individual sur- 
renders himself in a greater or less degree to the 
exhortation of the preacher, to the thought of 



£80 W. E. FORD 

the common desire to witness some psychical phe- 
nomenon, or to the considered statement of the 
public speaker. This surrender connotes a form 
of free expression, which in Ford's argument is 
the continual tendency of his primal force, and 
as a result of the temporary failure of opposition, 
a higher form of reciprocity becomes immediately 
possible, a form that is manifested as the passing 
phenomenon of a group consciousness. In the 
larger instance of the national consciousness, the 
common subject of attention must obviously be 
wider in scope, an instance of which will inevita- 
bly occur to any one in this period of the present 
war. 

Now, it will probably be urged that this mani- 
festation of the higher consciousness is open to 
criticism on ethical grounds. The temporarily- 
created revivalist and psychic emotions will be 
condemned by the materialist; the public crowd's 
emotion by its political opponents; the fighting 
emotion by the pacifist. And all these condemna- 
tions can be upheld by a perfectly sound prag- 
matic argument based upon the values of social 
benefit. But Ford overrode all such considera- 
tions as these in his statement of the broad the- 
ory. He urged that the pragmatic test was no 
more applicable in this connection than the charge 
of cruelty levied against an omniscient God. The 
phenomenon was too temporary and too various 
in its expression to be bottled for future use, and 
the only test we could apply, he suggested, was 
the test of potentiality. And as to that, there 



A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 281 

cannot, I think, be two opinions. The common 
emotion which animates a crowd to a momentary 
union, may be judged by some passing standard as 
useless or positively harmful; but it is an im- 
mensely powerful and effective force. And when 
such a common emotion has been maintained in 
the furtherance of a common purpose sacred to a 
particular group, the power evolved has been 
demonstrated as capable of radically changing the 
political, social, or religious conditions of a con- 
tinent. 

Another symbol for the enlargement of con- 
sciousness might be taken from the Life of the 
Bee. Maeterlinck became aware of some imma- 
terial entity that he called the ^'Spirit of the 
Hive''; but less poetical, less intuitive minds have 
been driven to the same kind of resort to explain 
the appearance of an unincorporated conscious- 
ness arising from a certain degree of reciprocity 
between sufficiently sensitive units. In this in- 
stance of the bees more particularly, and to a less 
degree in other examples of gregarious life (the 
law of the wolf -pack will serve as another type), 
the perfect submission of the unit seems to be the 
prime essential for the expression of a group con- 
sciousness — a deduction which so continually 
faced Ford that he later built upon it his theory 
of social philosophy. Nevertheless, a very clear 
distinction must be drawn between purposive and 
motiveless submission, using both expressions in 
relation to a quality of deliberateness exercised by 
the unit, and not in any sense as denoting the re- 



282 W. E. FORD 

suit achieved by the immanent will, which, accord- 
ing to Ford's definition, could have no deliberate 
purpose as we commonly regard it. 

The precise quality of this attention or submis- 
sion cannot possibly be defined in the present state 
of our knowledge ; though I find in the general at- 
titude another statement of Bacon's apophthegm 
that Nature can only be commanded by obeying 
her. When Ford first began to talk his philoso- 
phy to me, I received an impression of some 
vaguely pictured force or purpose ^^ coming 
through*'; and although I rather deprecate the 
slightly theological suggestion of that phrase, it 
has a certain applicability in some relations. But, 
indeed, a whole range of 'metaphors drawn from 
physics would portray the outline of the same 
figure. Any sympathetic vibration illustrates an 
aspect of reciprocity and at the same time the ap- 
pearance of the new phenomenon which inevitably 
arises out of any demonstration of union. ^ And 
it may well be that in different regions, a common 
chemical experiment, the swarming of the hive, 
and the expression of a national impulse, are but' 
unimportant variants of the same simple theme. 
Again, my chief point is the wideness of the anal- 
ogy rather than the applicability of a single in- 
stance. In expounding his theory of conscious- 
ness or his theory of causation. Ford sought to 
carry out an underlying principle by hinting and 

* Browning said the same thing when he wrote, of a musician, 
that out of three sounds he framed, 

**Not a fourth sound, but a star.'^ 



A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 283 

suggesting rather than by the exposition of dog- 
ma. For, as I hope to show later, the plasticity 
of the human mind illustrates a symptomatic con- 
dition in this relation. 

Lastly, before I leave these tentative notes on 
the subject of consciousness, I feel that I must 
make some reference to those aspects of apparent 
negation illustrated by the phenomena of sleep 
and death. No physiological explanation of the 
former condition has yet been universally ac- 
cepted, but there would seem to be a trend of 
opinion in favour of believing that '' natural' ' 
death or death from old age, is attributable 
broadly to some form of physical crystallisation. 
'' Natural' ' death, in fact, presents no real dififi- 
culty in this connection, displaying, perhaps, an 
instance of cumulative physical obstruction which 
finally ceases to convey the primitive urge behind 
life. Death from any other known cause is attrib- 
utable to a like failure of reciprocity between the 
units of the body, however different the accident 
which determines the immediate agent. The re- 
sult in every case is the passing from a compara- 
tive unison to a more or less absolute individuali- 
sation. Obviously the primal units of conscious- 
ness are for physical purposes indestructible; 
but their separation connotes a cessation of the 
group consciousness; just as the dispersal of the 
members of the hive would connote the disappear- 
ance of that collaboration which Maeterlinck has 
described as a spirit, and which has, indeed, a rec- 
ognisable entity. 



«84. W. E. FORD 

Sleep comes into quite another category, and 
I find no inspiration in the poetic figure which 
likens it to a little death. Personally I incline to 
the view that there is no cessation of conscious- 
ness either during natural sleep or during the 
failure of objective response evidenced by a sub- 
ject under an anaesthetic. The difference to my 
mind is one of manifestation. It is what I have 
earlier termed ''the potentiality for realisation'' 
that has inexplicably fallen. And if I am unwill- 
ingly compelled to leave that ''inexplicably'' con- 
fronting me with the blank negation of the insolu- 
ble, I find consolation in the thought that this 
problem belongs rather to the domain of the phys- 
iologist with his collaborators the physicist and 
the chemist, than to that of the philosopher. 
Since, to wind up this section of the general con- 
tention, it must, I think, be quite clear by this 
that the consciousness of Ford's premiss denotes 
a different concept from the ' ' awareness ' ' of cur- 
rent philosophy. "The spirit of the hive," for 
example, has been used as a type of group con- 
sciousness, but it is impossible to postulate it as 
a form of awareness attributable to any indi- 
vidual. 

When I first began to discuss philosophy with 
Ford, he shaped for me a little allegory designed 
as a bridge to lead over my hesitating thought 
from the practical application of my starting 
point to the unexplored region of the abstract in 
which I was then such a groping stranger. I used 



A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 285 

to call that allegory of his ' * the visitor story. ' ^ It 
was to me in those days a method by which I 
achieved distraction; and such was the frequent 
use I made of it that presently the story changed 
its function and I came to use it for the return 
instead of the outward journey. And I propose, 
now, to revert to that old allegory as a means of 
re-entering the net of material life. I have, in- 
deed, to recast the form in which the story was 
given to me ; and I admit that in my new version 
little if anything remains of Ford^s original in- 
tention. He gave me a way of escape from the 
throng of immediate worries which beset me at 
that time, and I found an intellectual refuge 
whence I was able to survey, a little drunkenly, 
perhaps, the limitations of my ordinary life. And 
in reversing the process, I lose more than the pur- 
pose of an anodyne, since I lose, also, the char- 
acteristic attitude of Ford himself. As I have 
used it here, the *^ visitor story ^' must not be 
made a criterion of Ford's personal philosophy. 
The essential symbol of the allegory hovers 
about that ability for abstraction which I once 
gained from steadily regarding myself as a vis- 
itor to this planet. This ability is a common pos- 
session of ours, and the knowledge has weighed 
more with me than any argument in favour of 
immortality. We are aware of two worlds, as we 
are aware of two (or more?) selves; and just as 
I am able to hold a controversial and even a 
heated duologue between myself and me, so am I 
able to take an objective or a subjective stand- 



286 W. E. FORD 

point. The ability to do these things varies no 
doubt with the individual, but in every one the 
power is there, and may be developed by use much 
as our physical co-ordinations may be developed. 

But, now, I am not leaving the common experi- 
ence of life, but returning to it ; and I want to set 
out, as lucidly as I may, the aspects of approach. 

All that had been accepted as the conventional 
appearance of life is become new and strange 
during the interval of absence. Language, the 
laws of civilised society, the restrictions of social 
intercourse, all the mechanical ordinances that 
have served to check free expression, are seen as 
brief artificial devices that enclose the minds of 
man in a brittle, imperfect cage. This pisture- 
language of ours, for example, this language that 
in its highest form achieves poetry not by direct 
statement but by delicate suggestion of that for 
which we have no symbol, is built almost exclu- 
sively from the metaphors of objective everyday 
experience. But coming as a visitor, I must tedi- 
ously learn some set of imperfect figures in or- 
der that I may communicate with a few of my fel- 
low-visitors, although I may never know them by 
that mechanical intercourse, nor can they recog- 
nise me. We are like children exchanging gifts. 
We hope that our little offering of words may be 
accepted as a pledge; but I know not what my 
fellow-child is seeking in return for his offering, 
which I, on my part, may despise. Even accept- 
ance is no evidence of understanding. If I offer 
that for which I find such symbols as love, devo- 



A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 287 

tion or friendship, I may never know by any fur- 
ther interchange of these toys of language how 
gratefully my offering has been received. Love 
takes little heed of words. 

And in lesser matters than this, language has 
little power to express, say, honesty of intention. 
In business we are forced to write our symbols 
on paper as an earnest that may be submitted to 
an arbitrary court of justice whose atfair it is to 
translate the formula into action, by the explicit 
or implicit threat of punishment. So much easier 
is it to conceal than to display our intentions by 
this queer mechanism of intercourse. 

When we are in the midst of objective life, the 
language we laboriously acquire soon appears as 
a comprehensible, even as a highly convenient, 
form of exchange; but the approaching visitor 
views it with foreboding and dismay. 

And what is true of language is equally true of 
custom, a secondary but indeed a still more terri- 
fying mechanism. Presently, when I have defi- 
nitely entered the spatial and temporal realm 
which so nearly shuts me in from any sight of 
reality, I shall accept custom as a rigid and es- 
sential ordinance built upon the experience of the 
generations. The laws and conventions of a little 
group of visitors — by inclining the development 
of some common factor towards a formula for 
reciprocity within the confines of a similar lan- 
guage — will so bind me for a time that I may 
come to regard these temporary rules as inspired 
ordinances framed by the disciplanarian God who 



W. E. FORD 

is the ideal representative of the particular race 
I have fortuitously visited. 

Again, I shall find comfort and entertainment 
within this little cage ^ of matter ; I shall find 
ideals of success and personal happiness; worst 
of all I shall encourage obstinate antagonisms 
against my fellow-men, forgetting that they, too, 
are visitors no less than I. 

I pause for an instant, already partly entan- 
gled, wondering, debating. Is it possible, I ask, 
for me to remember my vision of matter from 
without ? All these vast knots and intricacies ter- 
rify me by their massive threat of obstruction. 
I may not forget, but I shall soon be groping in 
a tangled web of endless restraints. And the only 
means of stating and holding my remembrance 
will be this queer, clumsy language that has no 
words for the thing I struggle to remember. 

Two endowments alone are conferred upon me, 
intuition and imagination — neither of them defin- 
able save by such gross and clumsy metaphor as 
leaves them still inviolable. . . . 

An analysis of Ford's concerned with social 
values, that left a particular impression on my 
mind, sprang from a discussion of ours on the 
subject of unselfishness ; and this subject provides 
such an admirable approach to the whole question 
of motive that I cannot do better than attempt a 

* Sometimes I see it as a cage, at others as a net; neither figure 
is important, but I appreciate a distinction which marks a differ- 
ence of mood. The use of the word net comes with a certain 
restive uneasiness of mind, and cage is the more optimistic simile. 



A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 289 

summary of our general conclusions under that 
head. I say our conclusions, for I certainly be- 
lieved at the time that I contributed valuable ma- 
terial to the argument; but Ford had a way of 
avoiding credit for any originality, and it is 
quite probable that all my share was elicited by 
his suggestions. 

We began by the premiss that ''unselfishness" 
was a conscious self-denial, or self-expression, ex- 
ercised in order to gain some ulterior object which 
might or might not be consciously realised. This 
is, of course, a version of the old statement that 
pure unselfishness is inconceivable, since some 
personal reward inevitably follows an act of de- 
nial, even although such reward may be nothing 
more than a vague awareness of ethical consola- 
tion that will crown the physical inhibition. The 
generalisation is one of considerable cogency, and 
has often led to the conclusion that ''unselfish- 
ness" is only a relative term indicating a degree 
of capacity for immediate self-forgetfulness. 

Ford took that deduction a step further by pos- 
tulating that unselfishness could never become a 
true virtue until it could be described as abso- 
lutely selfish, not in motive but in expression. If 
a friend of mine is ill, he said, and I sit up with 
him — an act of self-denial that causes me, let us 
suppose, considerable physical inconvenience — I 
am obviously being relatively selfish if I stay with 
him, because I hope to gain the reward of my own 
approval. And this relative selfishness is a thing 
which we have agreed on general grounds to dis- 



290 W. E. FORD 

approve, at least for the purposes of this argu- 
ment. But if I sit up with my friend because my 
feeling for him is such that I cannot bear to leave 
him, the act takes quite a different colour. Ob- 
viously I appear in this case to serve nothing but 
my own desires. 

Such was Ford^s general example, but coming 
to it, now, with the deliberate criticism of one who 
attempts to enunciate a clear proposition, I find 
that half a dozen contingents have yet to be recon- 
sidered. When I listened to Ford, I followed his 
thought rather than his actual words, but I can- 
not expect that the prejudiced reader — and nearly 
all readers are necessarily prejudiced — will take 
for granted the various steps which I intuitively 
leaped. 

In this example, then, certain inevitable mis- 
conceptions must be cleared away before I can 
suggest the ideal that cannot be absolutely de- 
fined. In this act of what we have called pure 
selfishness, no account can be taken of any fu- 
ture satisfactions that may presently arise. As- 
suming that the devotion is mine, I do not, for in- 
stance, look for my friend's gratitude, so it may 
be further postulated that he is unconscious and 
will never learn the part I have played in nursing 
him. Again, I am not intent on saving him in 
-order that I may continue to enjoy his company 
in the future. We must, in short, eradicate any 
aspect of human, personal advantage whether im- 
mediate or anticipated, whether actively realised 
or completely subconscious. What remains is as 



A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 291 

difficult of analysis as the ''dog's temper^' of the 
Red Queen's classic example, the sublime and the 
ridiculous being nothing more than differences of 
presentation. We may, in fact, say that my "tem- 
per" (in its right sense) is postulated as the sole 
motive force in the "unselfish" act adduced; that 
what may appear to the introspective as an in- 
stance of self-denial is, indeed, the effortless, mo- 
tiveless expression of my love for a friend. The 
nearest recognisable parallel to such a form of 
expression must be found in the act of a man in 
a consuming rage, or, better still, perhaps, in the 
fury of a madman. It is essential to fix the at- 
tention on the thought of pure spontaneity, avoid- 
ing at the same time all the difficult suggestions 
that have come to haunt the word instinctive. 

Now, if this concept can be reached by intui- 
tion, it will resolve our terms of ' ' selfishness ' ' and 
"unselfishness" into an incongruous relativity. 
Both terms are practical, logical, and material, 
dealing, in effect, with some physical or spiritual 
bargain. They connote deliberation and effort, 
even if the primary impulse be so sudden as to ap- 
pear spontaneous and the reward be so vaguely 
imagined as to seem valueless as a stimulant. In 
either case both deliberation and effort must in- 
evitably appear during the long night watch of 
our example. 

On the other hand, the effortless, motiveless 
expression of our intuition has no limit of dura- 
tion, and is independent of any translation into 
act, just as it is beyond the reach of our persona? 



W. E. FORD 

recognition. Before I can appreciate my own 
performance, the trne expression must have 
ceased. To label the emotion with a cliche which 
has a valuable if incomplete significance, I lose 
myself in the thought of my friend. 

Eegarded from the practical, material stand- 
point, this pure expression of love, or longing, 
may appear to fail at the first moment of intro- 
spection. Directly I pause, as it were, in my long 
night watch and begin to probe my own motive, 
I seem to become again the selfishly unselfish 
creature of the first example. This difficulty, how- 
ever, is only apparent, since the pause for intro- 
spection indicates a temporary failure of expres- 
sion and not a cessation of the true impulse. Any 
distraction, such as a moan of pain from our un- 
conscious sufferer, will immediately dissipate the 
interrupting force of the introspective mind, and 
once more permit the free effusion of our motive- 
less longing. That longing might perhaps be com- 
pared in this instance with any physical force, in- 
ferentially continuous but intermittently exhib- 
ited according to the potentiality or condition of 
the material agent. The force itself neither ceases 
nor varies in kind, but the least diversion of the 
recording instrument is sufficient to interrupt the 
manifestation. The power is cut off, the agent 
temporarily depolarised. 

If this instance be accepted, it must be taken as 
stating a very important premiss with regard to 
the fundamental ethic of all human actions, inas- 
much as the instance assumes an extraneous im- 



A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 293 

pulse that will be manifested whenever the human 
condition is such as to permit free expression. 
Assuming this premiss, then, for the sake of ar- 
gument, we come at once to the important consid- 
eration of conduct and morality in relation to ul- 
timate development. 

Ford died before Glutton Brock's book, The 
Ultimate Belief, was published, but it seems to 
me that there is in that work a tendency, not quite 
clearly expressed, to formulate one aspect of 
Ford's philosophy. Mr. Brock takes a leap — not, 
in my opinion, quite justifiable as yet — and as- 
sumes that the ^'extraneous impulse" of our il- 
lustration works altogether for what we call good. 
Ford would, I know, have agreed in principle, but 
he would have postulated that this goodness is not 
of the kind that would at the present time be, 
without exception, recognised as morality. He 
admitted two extreme types, that may be classi- 
fied as the free and the inhibited — neither ever at- 
taining complete development — and while he as- 
serted that the free was the ideal and the inhib- 
ited the stunted condition, he constantly warned 
me that the condition of freedom was one that 
was amazingly deceptive. I must, however, state 
my terms more broadly before I come to the ques- 
tion of stipulations. And since it is the easier of 
the two, and a definition of the contrasted condi- 
tion arises out of it by implication, I will take 
inhibition as the first subject. 

Now, in the first place, it is essential to find 
some means of distinguishing inhibition from self- 



294 W. E. FORD 

control, in order to clear away the suspicion 
which would otherwise inevitably arise, that Ford 
intended to portray ideal humanity as an automa- 
ton, reacting to some agency it could not compre- 
hend. The main difference between these two 
human abilities much resembles the difference be- 
tween courage and fear. The man who faces and 
conquers temptation displays self-control; the 
man who runs away from a temptation displays 
an aspect of inhibition. If I say that I will not 
permit myself to think of a sex longing and by an 
effort of will deliberately and, apparently, suc- 
cessfully thrust the whole subject of sex relations 
into some secret chamber of my mind, I commit 
an act of fear. I admit that my longing is so 
strong that I dare not face it. Nevertheless, be- 
cause the word inhibition has been so freely used 
by the psychologists and the medical profession 
to describe a normal act of self-control, it is as 
well to throw all the specialised meanings of the 
word into the category of what might be called 
^'morbid'' inhibitions. This category would, in 
my opinion, include any act of self- suppression 
that had a quality of fear. I see inhibition in my 
own thought, as being in the nature of a convul- 
sive clenching. It is a shutting out, a closing of 
the mind, a cowering and a denial of that which 
sanity demands that we should affirm. Of the 
physiological effects of such morbid inhibitions I 
need say nothing here. The psycho-analysts have 
demonstrated that this convulsive clenching of the 
mind almost invariably leads to some form of hys- 



A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 295 

teria, a condition that may often be cured when 
the cramp of the original act is, as it were, re- 
leased by confession. But the moral effect is far 
more dangerous, and in one sense it may be said 
to be contagious, since the inhibited frequently 
come to a morbid admiration for their own inef- 
fectual morality and preach it to an ignorant con- 
gregation. 

I may, perhaps, come to a wider view of the 
many aspects of ^^ morbid*^ inhibition by consider- 
ing a somewhat bizarre illustration. Ford was 
familiar with the works of Freud and Jung and 
had met some of the practical exponents of the 
theory of psycho-analysis in London; and it was 
while he and I were discussing this theory that he 
gave me the instance I am about to describe. He 
had begun by severely criticising the limitations 
Freud had imposed upon himself by referring all 
forms of hysteria to a sexual complex, and came 
from that to a sudden and startling dictum by 
saying that the party politican was one of the fin- 
est instances of the inhibited mind. At first I un- 
derstood him to mean the actual representative 
or member; but he told me that he believed the 
greater number of members and certainly all those 
who had risen to high place were free from the 
peculiar obliquity he had in mind. He touched 
on that aspect of the House of Commons which 
presents it as the *^best club in London,'' and 
confessed his belief that it was very rare for any 
well-informed member of the Government to be 
the blind adherent of a particular policy. They 



296 W. E. FORD 

adopt a label, he said, botli for public convenience 
and purposes of private ambition; but it is quite 
incredible that any clear-sighted man should per- 
sistently and conscientiously vote ^'Liberal'' or 
* ^ Conservative ' ^ on any measure before the 
House. He then explained that his instance of 
the inhibited referred rather to the typical mid- 
dle- and upper-class voter. 

Since that conversation — it must have taken 
place, I think, in the winter of 1912-13 — I have 
made many applications of this instance and have 
found an appealing aspect of his theory. Indeed, 
it can hardly be denied that the politician who de- 
liberately and conscientiously refuses to admit 
virtue in his opponent's creed, must have inhib- 
ited in some degree his natural tendency to ac- 
quire knowledge. ^ To put it more plainly, the 
man, whether politician or religious enthusiast, 
who becomes fanatic to the point of denying any 
kind of validity to the unwelcome statement is, 
or at some time has been, influenced by fear. The 
attempted explanation of absorption in a par- 
ticular line of thought does not invalidate this 
statement, for although that explanation may ac- 
count for an original bias or eventual hyper- 
trophy in a particular direction, it cannot ac- 
count for the blindness of the fanatic. The spe- 
cialist cannot, for example, pretend to be an au- 
thority on a subject outside his own province ; and 
he cannot specialise in politics, for example, by 

*I must beg that statement for the moment, but it is implicit 
in the whole of Ford's philosophy. 



A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 297 

studying a single aspect of the question. Ab- 
sorption in the propaganda of a particular party, 
where such absorption does not arise from a per- 
sonal, which is practically in this sense an eco- 
nomic interest, must imply that there has been a 
deliberate denial of the alternative policy ; and in 
the case of the common exponent of this political 
bigotry I have always found that the party enthu- 
siast was afraid to listen to any statement of his 
opponents. But, indeed, it should be evident that 
the absolute denial involved by a blind adherence 
to party, must constitute a form of morbid inhi- 
bition or obstruction. And, although I have taken 
this convenient illustration of politics and men- 
tioned the more complex example of religious 
fanaticism, it must be understood that the argu- 
ment applies with varying force to questions of 
belief in all forms that involve complete reject 
tion, without sufficient examination, of the alter- 
native statement. The fear of conversion, if it is 
not freed by a candid and liberal examination of 
the imagined dangers, can only be driven back by 
some form of what I have called morbid inhibi- 
tions. 

In this connection, however, it must be clearly 
understood, first, that there are degrees of reso- 
lution, and so of effectiveness in the inhibiting 
act; and, secondly, that in applying the test, say, 
to a man of public reputation, it is impossible to 
judge him by his public writings or utterances. 
Many Cabinet Ministers have the fullest sympa- 
thy with their opponents^ policy, and have per- 



298 W. E. FORD 

sisted in their own, either for purposes of private 
interest or of what they may regard as temporary 
expediency. Judged by the commonly prevailing 
standard of morality, such men are sometimes 
subjects for contempt ; but as a matter of fact they 
have been compelled by the very convention which 
condemns them. In a government which is elected 
by the inhibited, the free man can find no oppor- 
tunity for action. 

A further aspect of inhibition, and one that can- 
not primarily be included in the ^^ morbid" cate- 
gory, is that aspect which influences the common 
conditions of social intercourse. All our ordinary 
relations with mankind necessitate some form of 
self-repression, the most obvious examples being 
those arising from politeness and tact. In these 
examples, however, the normal, inhibitive act is 
merely one of self-control so long as nothing but 
our speech and conduct is restrained. It is only 
when the thought of such natural desires as would 
lead to a rupture of social relations is fearfully 
thrust back into the subconsciousness that the in- 
hibition may become morbid. It is evident in 
these examples that fear is again the dominant 
impulse ; and that the greater the fear of offend- 
ing, the more dangerous becomes the self-suppres- 
sion. 

Again the common impulse — probably arising 
in this case from a sexual complex — to shock a 
social gathering by some obscene act or expres- 
sion, may be dangerous to sanity if it be mentally 
suppressed with a shudder of fear. Some release 



A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 299 

from this inhibition is afforded in dreams — the 
characteristic dream of appearing naked among 
a crowd being an instance; but any tendency to 
morbidity is avoided by a quiet mental reception 
and examination of the impulse when it arises. 
Where there is no fear there is no danger, was 
one of Ford's obiter dicta. But enough if the gen- 
eral nature of morbid inhibition and obstruction 
has been indicated to allow the emergence of its 
opposite as a fairly definite conception. 

I have suggested in the foregoing paragraphs 
that Ford recognised two main forms of inhibi- 
tion. One of them comparatively innocuous and 
hardly distinguishable from self-control, namely, 
the form in which the thought is allowed free play 
in the mind, and only possible consequences of 
conduct and speech are withheld; while the other 
is that which I have called dangerous, and im- 
plies the terrified or shocked rejection of the 
thought itself. The first of these forms is also 
a form of the antithesis we are now examining. 
The acceptance of a thought and the refusal to 
express it in words or action is the higher form 
of inhibition and the lower form of identification 
with the primitive urge. The higher form of the 
latter dares all with splendid courage. But both 
forms are essential to the conduct of life under 
present conditions; or, perhaps, I should rather 
say in the present state of our psychical and phys- 
ical development. 

I must admit, however, that the necessity for 



300 W. E. FORD 

the use of restraint in this passing stage of our 
evolution constitutes a difficulty that Ford never 
made quite clear to me. On a priori grounds he 
found this necessity hard to explain and his near- 
est approximation to a solution was probably the 
one I indicated in a previous paragraph, namely, 
that our standard of goodness is constantly chang- 
ing. Starting from his original hypothesis he 
could not deny the validity of impulse, but he 
sought to justify its expression to meet the de- 
mands of the multiform other impulses to which 
it would necessarily be opposed. 

I remember his speaking of the *^ crazy impa- 
tience'' of Nietzsche in this connection, and the 
phrase stuck in my mind and has furnished me 
with the vague outline of a test. For it must be 
evident that Ford's theory of the rightness of 
free expression would, if it were pressed to its 
logical conclusion, coincide exactly with Nietz- 
sche's principle of saying **Yea, to Life." Yet, 
if we give a free rein to hate, lust, and appetite 
— impulses which appear far more general than 
the covering antitheses of love and the desire 
for the beautiful — ^we appear inevitably to be 
riding towards destruction. The phrase ** crazy 
impatience" has suggested to me the possibility 
of emergence from this apparently blind alley. 
Let me take ^'Hate" as an example. 

Now in some forms hatred has been upheld as 
an admirable quality. Christ exhibited quite 
clearly His hatred of hypocrisy and expressed 
it both in His words and actions; while hatred 



A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 301 

of injustice and oppression is so universally ad- 
mired among civilised nations, that we have 
boldly proclaimed it as the inspiration of Eng- 
land's motive for entering the Great War. But 
if it be praiseworthy to hate what we call an 
*^evir' principle, how can we avoid the infer- 
ence that it is justifiable to hate the exponents 
of an evil principle? Christ preached salvation 
by an act of defensive meekness, and drove out 
the money-lenders with a scourge ; and it is a la- 
mentable fact that the gospel of love has failed 
to overcome the gospel of hate in the practice 
of human affairs. It would seem to follow, there- 
fore, that failing to convert the exponent of evil 
we are justified in meeting hate with hate. 

Can we find a way out of this impasse without 
a partial withdrawal of our premisses, in the 
thought of that ** crazy impatience"? To me the 
phrase represents at once a qualification and a 
definition; but I will confine myself to the defini- 
tion as the qualification is implicit. 

Let us assume, then, that hate of what we are 
pleased to call evil or obstruction is a natural 
impulse and works for good or liberation; and 
beg, for a moment, the question of whether the 
subject of passion can excuse an impulse which 
might be evil if otherwise directed. Beyond this 
I would postulate that the impulse of hate is al- 
ways courageous, and further that many of its 
supposed expressions, such as ferocity or bru- 
tality, are so poisoned with fear that they can- 
not be called free; but are, in fact, an instance 



W. E. FORD 

of craziness. And to complete the analogy of 
our phrase, I would submit that impatience must 
always imply some inner restraint; that we are 
not, as a matter of fact, impatient with anything 
but our own weakness to overcome a real or imag- 
ined obstacle. 

To elaborate the last paragraph I will suggest 
a couple of illustrations, and ask first if ferocity 
or cruelty can possibly be the expressions of the 
thing I have in mind as a spontaneous impulse? 
The terrorised animal, such as the uniformed 
German citizen suspecting treachery from every 
member of the outraged Belgian population, dis- 
plays ferocity. And we are told that the greater 
part of the German nation displays the same 
tendency, occasionally, against the threat of Eng- 
lish interference. But I insist without hesitation 
that the instance is essentially one of inhibition. 
I do not believe that the average German citizen 
can exhibit pure impulsive hate. He has been 
terrified, and in defence he has inhibited all his 
natural desire towards fraternity, towards peace, 
towards a sentimental good humour so far as the 
English are concerned. (The English, not Eng- 
land ; that stands to him merely as a meaningless 
symbol of an imagined evil.) He dare not con- 
sider, much less liberate, his natural gentleness. 
He has thrust it far back into his subconscious- 
ness, as a danger and an obstacle that may pre- 
vent his winning the War. And every word of 
this condemnation applies to ourselves not less 
than to our present enemies. This hate of ours 



A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 303 

and theirs, represents a deliberate clenching of 
our natural expression. There is nothing cour- 
ageous or liberating in this hate that finds emer- 
gence in ferocity. 

In the same way I would urge that impatience 
always implies some inner suppression, or even 
that impatience is nothing more than a symptom 
of a divided mind, of desires thwarted by our 
inability to find free expression. To take a pal- 
try instance — as probably the more difficult ex- 
ample to explain — if I fumble with a knot in my 
boot-lace and finally break it in exasperation, I 
exhibit the sjTuptoms of a double purpose. On 
the one hand, I have lacked the concentration to 
disentangle the knot; on the other, I have not at 
once put that intention away from me and solved 
the problem by an exercise of strength. And it 
would be quite easy to prove that every symptom 
of impatience is due to a similar opposition of 
two or more half-expressed intentions. The bar 
that thwarts us is not the material or psychical 
opposition we meet from without, but our own in- 
ability to find the single countervailing force of 
expression. Impatience, in fine, denotes hesita- 
tion; and hesitation implies the need for inhibit- 
ing one or more modes of thought or action. 

From these illustrations we come to a thought 
of our ideal impulse of hate as being in its es- 
sence a single desire; and we must therefore ex- 
clude from our consideration all those apparent 
examples of hate which imply a mixed intention, 
and thus the necessity for the suppression of. 



304 W. E. FORD 

say, a counterbalancing ethical motive. And I 
do not believe (I join issue here with Mr. Glutton 
Brock's theory expressed in The Ultimate Belief) 
that human hatred ever finds this singleness of 
impulse unless the cause of the hatred is, in some 
sense, a righteous one. We have moved too far 
towards sympathy and understanding to hate the 
unoffending. Hate is a natural impulse and a 
wonderful power, but it can never find pure ex- 
pression unless it is great enough to be as single- 
minded as love. Indeed, I am not sure that hate 
and love are necessarily opposites. It seems 
possible that if we could refine our definitions 
to absolute purity, we might reach the single, un- 
diluted base of both emotions. 

This long diversion has taken me somewhat 
away from my exposition of Ford's philosophy, 
inasmuch as I have been striving to justify him 
by an inductive process of my own — a risky task 
for the exegete. At the same time I believe that 
my attempted analysis has done something to in- 
dicate, if only by implication, an important prin- 
ciple of his general theory. So much depends 
on that ** singleness of mind," I have deliberately 
insisted upon; a description that denotes not the 
narrow-minded fury of the fanatic, but a con- 
sciousness of unity with all life, with something 
more than physical humanity. 

In a former paragraph I made reference to 
Ford's phrase the ^'tenuity of genius," and as 
this chapter does not purport to be anything more 
than a haphazard collection of notes, I may ad- 



A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 305 

cluce that instance here as a further commentary 
on the fundamental theory. *^ Tenuity, '* in this 
sense, does not, of course, denote ^ thinness," but 
was used in its derivative meaning as applied to 
fluids, and indicates — if I may put it negatively 
— a lack of density. The quality of mind that is 
exhibited as genius, had in it, according to Ford, 
something peculiarly subtile, and as it were dis- 
crete. On the other hand, I remember his using 
one of his hasty figures and saying that the par- 
ticles of the man of genius behaved like steel fil- 
ings in a magnetic field, * ^ leaping to arrangement 
and interpretation.'' But both figures imply 
mobility, and that is, perhaps, the more incon- 
clusive concept. And to mobility again must be 
added the idea of a higher potential for that re- 
ciprocity between the units which was discussed 
in its relation to consciousness. 

All these phrases and figures, however, must 
not be too rigorously related to a physical con- 
ception. The base of our unit as discussed in an 
earlier paragraph is not material but spiritual. 
At the same time there is no absurdity in the 
assumption that this primitive spiritual unit 
should obey those laws which we have hypothe- 
cated as controlling the limitations of matter. 
When we come to examine those '^laws,'' indeed, 
we find that no one of them is susceptible of an 
a priori explanation. Are we, for example, quite 
unable to prove that the law of gravitation might 
be suspended in certain conditions which do not 
happen to have occurred within human experi- 



306 W. E. FORD 

ence? We have no more knowledge of the true 
'^how'' and ^^why'* of gravitation than we have of 
the intentions of God. . 

For these reasons I maintain that there is no 
inherent absurdity, even from the point of view 
of the physicist, in postulating an ultimate atom 
which is not material and yet — in the complexes 
that alone permit our awareness of its functions 
— conforms within human experience to certain 
inferred principles of apparently mechanical con- 
duct. And it is this elusive, undefinable unit 
which Ford referred to, in his suggestion of 
greater *^ mobility ^^ in the composition of the 
mere physical structure of the man whom we rec- 
ognise as a genius. He always avoided the use 
of such words as brain or mentality in this con- 
nection ; agreeing with Samuel Butler that we are 
far too apt to relate all physical phenomena, such 
as that of memory, to this single function. He 
admitted that he was unable to give a precise 
value to that function in the human economy. It 
might, he thought, be a predominant one. But 
he inclined to believe that the work of the brain 
was primarily one of correlation rather than of 
initiative ; while he always assumed that what we 
call character or personality was inherent in the 
constitution of the individual as a whole and de- 
pended largely on that constitution's potentiali- 
ties for mobility and reciprocity. 

With such assumptions it becomes, I think, in- 
creasingly evident that the man of genius is one 
who mobilises most easily into ^ * arrangement and 



A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 307 

interpretation" under the impulse of the primi- 
tive urge; and so is able to reveal some fraction 
of that universal content, which this ^^ primitive 
urge'' of ours is always seeking to express. And 
if we make application of this wide principle to 
the meagre data we have so far collected as bear- 
ing on the problem under consideration, we shall 
find that the empiric or pragmatic test may be 
reasonably satisfied — ^possibly to the complete 
reconciliation of Nordau and Shaw. 

As an example of this application I may note 
that genius, according to Ford, must be vagarious 
if it is to come to its fullest expression. To ap- 
ply the more or less mechanical formula sug- 
gested above, the arrangement which tends to be- 
come static destroys its own value for interpre- 
tation. In the attempt to express an universal 
it is fatal to crystallise an abstraction, for it then 
inclines to become obstructive. Nietzsche is an 
excellent instance of this principle. So long as 
he remained mobile to the creative suggestion he 
was an immensely valuable interpreter. But when 
he fell in love with his own abstraction, he shut 
out, as it were, all impulses that did not subserve 
his immediate purpose, which then became 
cramped, didactic, inconclusive. The effect upon 
himself was inevitable. His high original poten- 
tiality, or, in other words, his sensitivity, indi- 
cated a force strong enough to inhibit what he re- 
garded as antagonistic impulses, all too com- 
pletely. Thus he lost his capacity for mobility, 
and mobility being an essential function of his 



308 W. E. FORD 

character as a man of genius he destroyed himself 
by assuming rigidity. Or it may seem, Ford said, 
abruptly changing the metaphor, as if he had 
drowned himself. While he kept all his gates open 
to the flood the stream poured through him, but 
when he closed one after another until only one 
was left, the flood rose higher and higher until 
he was swept away. For a time, you know, it 
looks as if we were doing an immense work with 
that one open gate — the rush is so terrific. But 
it can't last. There must be other outlets. That 
single gate is known to us pathologically as the 
idee fixe. 

And that metaphor may help us to explain the 
apparent immorality of some men of genius. They 
must open their volitions to other impulses or be 
drowned. But sometimes those other gates are 
drawn too high, and then the stream of interpre- 
tation may dwindle to the veriest trickle. ** Again 
you may find another illustration of what I mean 
in my metaphors,'' he once wrote to me, **the 
single illustration that tends to crystallise the 
idea is an awful snare. You cannot express 
genius in a purely physical formula." 

I am uncomfortably aware that these notes are 
lamentably insufficient, but I dare not expand 
them. I see only too clearly that if I once permit 
myself to attempt a fuller exposition, all the first 
part of this book will shrink to a mere preface in 
comparison with the immense work I feel so 
strongly inclined to write. That work, however, 



A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 309 

must be postponed until I have the leisure to col- 
late Ford^s material. Meanwhile I must point 
out that what I have written here must not be 
subjected to too intensive or stringent criticism. 
All that I have attempted in this place is sugges- 
tion. I have found in Ford's philosophy the hint 
of a new aspect; and I have striven to convey 
that, often to the detriment of a logical statement. 
But, indeed, although a reasoned analysis must 
succeed to this mere indication of a test and a 
formula, I know that the analysis must tend to 
narrow and obstruct the fundamental principle. 
It is the limitation of the logical method that it 
attempts too complete an exposition, and so crys- 
tallises a part to the rejection of all those appar- 
ently contradictory impulses that also seek ex- 
pression. The analogy of Ford's primary assump- 
tion runs through every example. We cannot ex- 
press the whole, but the danger of morbid inhibi- 
tion lies behind every denial. And Ford would 
agree with me in affirming that a positive immor- 
ality (as we now regard it) is a far more admir- 
able thing than a negative virtue. 

J. D. B. 

A FURTHER NOTE ON FORD'S 
PHILOSOPHY 

By K. R. 

I CONSIDER that Ford was not so much a philoso- 
pher as a man who tried to live in the light of a 



310 W. E. FORD 

philosophical outlook — or, to put it better, of a 
philosophical ^^inlook.*' His philosophy was pri- 
marily felt, and only incidentally formulated. He 
seemed at times to reach back into hidden re- 
cesses of his mind and to draw upon a subcon- 
scious store of wisdom ; at other times he seemed 
— I can only put it in this way — literally to create 
wisdom. The point which I feel I must empha- 
sise is that every expression of his philosophy to 
which he gave voice was an ad hoc expression. 
Devoted to synthesis, to the mental task of view- 
ing reality, value, and purpose as a coherent 
unity, he no sooner gave thought to the smallest 
significant problem than he made it an essential 
fragment of the universal problem; but for him 
the universal existed to be explored by intuition 
in the interests of the immediate. He maintained 
that one cannot consciously build up an intellec- 
tual conception of the universe without gradually, 
and at last completely, exchanging interest in the 
universe for interest in dialectic. He had a con- 
structive philosophy, but it was intuitional, and 
that is why neither Beresford nor I can explain 
how he constructed it. He let the material re- 
cede into the back of his mind and the philosophy 
constructed itself ; that is one way of putting it. 

Or I could say that he treated intuition as a 
faculty that can be trained by practice in its func- 
tion of apprehending, by degrees, the nature of 
the universe; this best expresses my own notion 
of the matter, and, I think, best renders Ford^s 
notion, but to postulate this subconscious func- 



A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 311 

tion — or superconscious function, as I should pre- 
fer to call it — is to make a very large prior as- 
sumption. I will therefore leave open the hypoth- 
esis of superconscious constructive thought (an 
idea familiar to any one who has ever *^ slept on" 
a knotty problem) side by side with that of su- 
perconscious apprehension of existing structure; 
without prejudice to the further possibility that 
the two hypotheses may be related aspects of the 
same truth. 

Now, in presenting to Beresford the nearest ap- 
proach that he ever made to a formal statement 
of his philosophical position. Ford was none the 
less following his usual practice and interpreting 
his intuition for the furtherance of an immediate 
end. (I need hardly labour the point that the 
more strictly immediate an end, the more it ex- 
cludes ulterior motive.) And the end in this case 
iSnds its fulfilment in Beresford 's foregoing chap- 
ter. It was to elicit a view of the universe that 
he and Beresford could hold in common. Hence 
Beresford 's difficulty in knowing how much is 
Ford's and how much his own. When Ford gave 
you an idea he kept no mortgage upon it himself ; 
he made it your own idea by unrestricted deed of 
gift. And to give — to give effectually — ^was al- 
ways the most immediate of his aims. 

What I have just written would imply a criti- 
cism of Beresford 's presentation, were it not that 
it reinforces his claim to make that presentation 
as much of a personal re-interpretation as he 
chooses. Beresford has spoken of our difference 



312 W. E. FORD 

of view as to the teleological trend of Ford's phi- 
losophy. I will not try to show how his presenta- 
tion could be converted, by certain differences of 
proportionate emphasis without any change of 
substantial statement, into a teleology qualified 
only by necessary human incomprehension. I 
only mention that this would be possible, so that 
in .speaking further of Ford's doctrine of imme- 
diate ends — which, unless it is teleological, is 
pragmatism unmitigated and abominable — I may 
not lose essential touch with that region of his 
intuitive speculations which Beresford has por- 
trayed. 

For the practical Ford, the Ford of daily in- 
genuities and expediencies in school work, was 
identical with the Ford whom we remember 
reaching back into the depths of his mind — or the 
depths beyond his mind — for that conception of 
'^the primary urge behind life." But when I 
think of his philosophy as expressed in daylight 
action, my instinct (I am willing to underline 
the ^^my") pictures him as listening and respond- 
ing to a whispered call from before, rather than 
as yielding to a suggestive pressure from behind. 
As the parents used to say of their children, he 
could be led but he could not be driven. The dis- 
tinction is only a symbolism, in connection with 
a ** primary urge," which must be conceived as 
extra-spatial and extra-temporal; but it matters 
a good deal to my present purpose. 

I have given some slight indication of Ford's 
views about the function of intuition in framing 



A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 313 

a cosmology, and Beresford has caught the au- 
thentic thrill of his venturous journeys into the 
darker unknown; it needs an effort of imagina- 
tive understanding to co-ordinate this with the 
principle of immediate ends which was the basis 
of his practical philosophy of life. Still, this 
principle can be defined in terms of intuition — 
of intuition in league with intellect. The imme- 
diate end is the end towards which no secondary 
or ulterior motive points; it is the end dictated 
by the nearest possible approach of pure volition. 
An act of volition. Ford would maintain, was 
'*pure'' in so far as it was prompted by intuition 
alone; the function of intellect was to keep open 
the right intuitive channel, by recognising ulte- 
rior motives and holding them on one side. Not 
that an ulterior motive, in his view, was neces- 
sarily irrelevant to right action; it was often ex- 
tremely relevant, but always subordinate. Pure 
volition had first to be isolated in the mind (he 
characterised this as a clumsy description of a 
very swift, habitual form of mental action) ; it 
had then to be set free along the open channel, 
drawing relevant motive after it in its course 
leaving irrelevant motive behind. The union of 
this conception with Beresford 's formula of 
*^ effortless, niotiveless expression" will be ob- 
vious enough, and I can turn to its practical ap- 
plication, especially its application to the teach- 
ing of children. 

It seems to me that Ford got right away from 
the usual pendulum-swing between the morbidly 



314 W. E. FORD 

introspective and the cheerfully conscienceless 
view of conduct, by putting his finger upon the 
true function of the introspective faculty. Sim- 
ple action upon impulse, entirely non-moral as 
far as the consciousness is aware, has the gen- 
eral approval of mankind in spite of its obvious 
dangers: even in the case of crime, we condone 
the crime of impulse while we condemn the crime 
of intention. The problem is to interpose the 
conscious censorship, the conscious inhibition 
(later, of course, to become habitual and in that 
sense subconscious) without clogging the passage 
for pure volition. Ford believed that, instinc- 
tively fearing this obstruction, we shrink from ap- 
phdng introspection and inhibition until some- 
thing has gone manifestly and uncomfortably 
wrong; and then it is too late for the right use 
of the unpractised power. Consequently, he 
taught children to sift their own motives continu- 
ally, as a kind of mental game, and so to give the 
introspection-faculty continual practice upon ma- 
terial that was not painful to touch; thus, he be- 
lieved, a habit of easy, rapid and entirely healthy 
introspection was encouraged. On the other hand, 
he never fostered introspection when a child was 
in some small crisis of difficulty, but waited for 
the inflammation to subside. 

I was puzzled as to the process by which inhi- 
bitions could be ranged, as in the mental picture 
he had given me, to form as it were a guard of 
honour for pure volition ; his only explanation was 
that they arranged themselves, when once the 



A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 315 

healthy habit of mind was in operation. They be- 
came knotted and obstmctive (he twisted his fin- 
gers together to convey a sense of painful ten- 
sion) when they had been habitually applied to 
none but the *^sore places in the consciousness. '* 
We seem to touch here upon the genesis of those 
inhibitions due to fear of which Beresford has 
spoken. 

Ford left the picture of normal inhibitions con- 
stituting a ^* guard of honour'' for pure volition, 
to stand as his meaning while he cleared the field 
of discussion; but he meant more. The function 
of intellect in morals was not merely negative and 
restrictive. It was also directive ; and it is here 
that the word inhibition fails. A gas-pipe, he 
said, inhibits the gas from escaping where it is 
not wanted and would be dangerous; but it also 
performs the very positive function of directing 
the gas to the precise places where illumination 
is needed; and he sketched a conception of the 
moral consciousness as a system of flexible, sen- 
tient tubes — subtle tentacles of mind-stuff — ready 
at a moment's notice to dart a jet of volition into 
the right place. But this figure erred on the other 
side, making volition too subservient, unless one 
imagined that the nature of the volition deter- 
mined the direction to be accorded for its own 
best expression. 

I am trying to give, by means of fugitive hints 
and recollections, some notion of the way in 
which Ford related his wide intuitive conception 
of the nature of the universe to the particular 



316 W. E. FORD 

problem of everyday morals. Perhaps I can best 
sum up that relation by saying that he saw the 
** primary urge'' as functioning through an un- 
thinkable multiplicity of channels, constituting 
in total a resistance, like the resistance of a vast 
and complex electrical circuit, through which only 
a power of unthinkable magnitude could manifest 
itself. And the microcosm of human individuality 
is also a complex ramification of resistances, 
through which volition plays, breaking down and 
re-fashioning the structure in the course of self- 
expression. No man can come near to expressing 
his own total volition, his own small share in the 
** primary urge,'' except in rare moments of high 
passion ; the moral problem in the main is that of 
directing volition through resistance. And lie^' 
the practical question about volition itself arises : 
what is the objective of will! Ford's principle of 
immediate ends furnishes, I think, a much-to-be- 
desired point of union between the volitional prin- 
ciple and practical morality. It gives to true im- 
mediacy the dignity of an ultimate — of The 
Ultimate. 

We are still in the cold as to the nature of that 
motiveless motive (the naked paradox is unavoid- 
able) which lies behind the merely temporary 
explanation of immediacy. What volition is there 
that is in no sense mediate? I can draw an an- 
swer only from Ford's life and character; he 
never stated his final principle in so many words. 
But I come to a conclusion which Beresford's 
presentation has foreshadowed in assigning an 



A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 317 

ultimate value to the principle of reciprocity. 
Here I am afraid of colouring Ford's philosophy 
with an eschatology of my own to which I cannot 
be sure that he would have assented, though per- 
sonally I feel it to be in essential unity with his 
thought. But I am on safe ground in saying that 
fellowship — service — the constructive union of 
human volitions — in a word, that Love was the 
one immediate principle of his own practical mo- 
rality; and I can scarcely hesitate to go further, 
and to say that he believed in some ultimate syn- 
thesis in terms of Love. Or — if I continue to 
grope for definitions in a region where the intel- 
lectual boundaries fade and disappear — that this 
synthesis was not so much ultimate as perpetual, 
and, because perpetual, eternal, timeless. Ford 
was more sternly sincere in facing the implica- 
tions of reality than any man whom I have known ; 
and he also, more than any man whom I have 
known, put his trust in reality, with all its para- 
doxes, its bewildering maze of indeterminate 
equations. Some inner sense in him was satisfied 
by that exacting and laborious service. He de- 
clined to fall back upon comfortable illusions of 
certainty. I can see no other interpretation than 
that he surmised a purpose in life, implying a 
realisation of triumph and joy in that Immediate 
which is our window upon the Eternal. 



THE END 



35+77 "7 



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